The day after: An apocalyptic morning (108 page)

              "Paula," Skip said. "You could be killed down there. You could be cut up into pieces one by one. I can't allow that."

              "You're my husband, Skip," she said, "not my boss. This is my decision to make."

              "And mine," Paul put in. "And I don't like the idea of risking one of our women to..."

              "We have women falling out of our assholes in Garden Hill," Paula interrupted angrily. "Don't try to exclude me because of my sex. If you have a legitimate reason, then let's here it, Boss Man, but if it's because I have a pussy instead of a cock, keep your fucking mouth shut."

              Paul reeled a bit under the ferocity of her tone. He looked over at Skip. "The ball's in your court, bud," he said. "She's aced me."

              Skip looked at her. "I don't want to risk you, Paula," he said. "You're my wife and I love you. I have no reason other than that one."

              "That's sweet, Skip," she said, giving him a smile. "But it's also not good enough. I want to go, I need to go. Besides, it'll get me out of this flying deathtrap for a while."

              Skip kept his eyes on her for far longer than was probably safe considering that he was in a hover. "Christ," he muttered. "Paula, are you sure?"

              "I'm sure," she told him. "I'm going down."

              "Give us three hours," Paul said next. "Fly back to town and then return at 3:30. I'll have them let me use the radio to contact you. If everything is cool, I'll give you the code word... oh... corporation. If something is wrong, if they're trying to use us to bait a trap, we'll use the word conglomerate."

              "Corporation if good, conglomerate if bad," Skip said. "And what if we don't hear from you at all? Or what if they give us hostage demands?"

              "We've already been over that," Paul told him. "We're expendable. This helicopter is not. You are to attempt no rescue mission of any kind for either one of us. Is that clear?"

              "It's clear," he said, not liking it one bit.

              "Good. Now let's call back our friend, shall we?"

              "You're the boss," Skip said.

              Paul let this remark go and contacted his counterpart on the radio once again now that the decision was made. "We have decided to drop off two representatives just outside of town if that is acceptable," he told him. "We will come down unarmed and we will wait for your pick-up."

              "I understand," Wilson replied, his voice with a slight hint of pleasure in it. "I will leave the landing area up to you. Where will you be touching down?"

              Paul, hearing this, looked over at Skip. "What do you think?" he asked.

              Skip, despite his trepidation, was impressed by the offer to choose their own landing zone. This meant that this Wilson person had anticipated that they would worry about a trap being set. "Tell him we'll drop you off on Highway 50 about a half mile west of their westernmost guard position on the hill. It's relatively empty over there and it also lets them know that we know their defensive arrangements without sounding hostile."

              Paul nodded and repeated the words. If they had any effect on Wilson, he didn't let it show. "I understand," he replied. "I'll meet you there in ten to fifteen minutes with a truck."

              "Ten to fifteen minutes," Paul agreed, closing the connection. He turned to Skip again. "Let's get it done."

              Skip turned the helicopter to the south and began to descend even as he picked up speed. He circled widely around until he was orbiting 1500 feet above the spot he had chosen. Jack checked the surrounding area with the FLIR as a Micker of course.

              "It's clear down there as far as I can tell," he said.

              "Okay," Skip said. He looked at the two back seat passengers again. "Last chance to back out," he told them. "Are you two sure about this?"

              "I'm not sure about anything," Paul replied. "But take us down anyway."

              "What he said," Paula replied.

              He turned his attention back to the instruments and the view outside and quickly brought them down, making a controlled descent until the skids were resting on the wet pavement of Highway 50's eastbound lanes. Paula and Paul, both of whom had stripped off their sidearms, opened the doors and, with one last word of farewell, stepped out. They trotted to the side of the road, their heads hunched low beneath the spinning rotor.

              "They're clear," Jack said once they were.

              "Right," Skip replied, giving them one last, doubtful glance. With nothing else to do, he applied power and lifted back off, bringing them quickly up to an altitude of 2000 feet above the ground. He stood off to the west, watching as a truck - some sort of yuppie SUV - left the town and drove slowly down the surface of the highway.

              "They'll be fine," Jack said doubtfully as the SUV came closer and closer to Paula and Paul, who could be seen as tiny figures standing helpless in the middle of the roadway.

              "Yeah," Skip said, not comforted much.

              The SUV came to a stop about twenty feet from them. Skip and Jack watched as three people stepped out. From the air it appeared that two of them were women. They did not have any rifles on them but Jack was able to tell by looking through the FLIR's magnification setting that all had sidearms. They kept these weapons in their respective holsters. The two groups approached each other slowly, seeming to talk as they did this.

              "They're putting their hands up!" Jack barked as Paula and Paul both raised their hands into the air and turned around.

              "Relax," Skip said, watching this development carefully. "They're just patting them down. It's the same thing we would do in those circumstances."

              The pat down was quick but seemed thorough. Once it was complete, handshakes were exchanged all around. Paula and Paul both gave encouraging waves up at the helicopter and then, of their own free will, climbed into the back of the SUV. Their hosts climbed in after them and a moment later, the vehicle turned around and headed back to town. Skip and Jack watched it until it disappeared over the rise.

              "Well," Skip said, once it was out of view, "I guess we head back then."

              "I guess so," Jack said.

              Skip turned the chopper to the south and skirted around the town. A few minutes later he was flying at ninety knots towards Cameron Park and home.

              The people of El Dorado Hills were very secretive. That was the first thing Paula and Paul noticed as they were driven into and then through the town. Though they already knew, from the tapes that Skip and Jack had made, that the town had a population of at least two hundred, no one, not a single person, was visible on the streets. They were taken directly to the elementary school where the SUV was parked in the parking lot outside the administration building. Their hosts, who aside from the initial introductions back at the pickup point had been completely silent, led them inside and up a hallway to a conference room. There was a large, simulated wood grain table with a few generic chairs around it.

              "This is where we hold our meetings," said Patrick, or Pat, as he had asked to be called, as they entered the room. He was a man in his mid-thirties, his eyes sharp and intelligent looking. Though friendly, he gave the distinct air that he could be dangerous when provoked. "Why don't you have a seat in here and we'll have a talk."

              "Right," said Paul, hiding his nervousness. He walked over and grabbed a seat on the side of the table. Paula followed him over and sat next to him.

              "Can I get you folks some tea?" asked Bonnie, the oldest of the escorting trio. She was a fit looking woman in her fifties. She had a thick mane of auburn hair that was starting to gray. Large, coke-bottle glasses sat upon her face. "We aren't as well set-up in the supply department as we probably should be, but we do have some nice herbal teas left over from the grocery store stocks."

              Paul opened his mouth to decline the offer but Paula beat him to the punch. "Tea would be nice," she said. "It's always easier to talk over a beverage, isn't it?"

              "Yes it is," Bonnie said with a smile. Instead of going out to get the tea herself, she lifted a portable radio to her lips and keyed it. "Howard?" she said into it. "This is Bonnie. Can you bring us settings for tea in the conference room?"

              "It'll be there in five minutes," replied a gruff male voice.

              "Thank you, Howard," she said and replaced the radio.

              The other member of the trio was Renee, who was also a little older of a woman than Paul and Paula were accustomed to seeing. She was in her forties and slightly chubby. Her thin, blonde hair was cut short. She too sported glasses upon her face. She sat down directly across from Paul and looked him up and down for a moment in a clinical manner. "You folks look fairly healthy from the outside," she told him.

              "Uh... thanks," Paul said. "Our food supply was starting to get a little short there for a while but we never did go through a period of starvation or anything like that. You all look reasonably well-fed as well."

              Pat nodded as he took his own seat. "We're hanging in here for the moment," he said. "As you've probably found out, scavenged food from the grocery store can only carry you for so far. We've had to find alternate sources."

              "Alternate sources?" Paula asked carefully, thoughts of cannibalism going through her head.

              Pat, seeming to read her mind, quickly put it at ease. "We're not eating our dead," he said lightly. "Trust me, when I said that we were shocked by your mentions of cannibalism, I was being entirely truthful. We've been subsidizing ourselves a little bit with the venison from the scraggly deer we've managed to bring down around here, but mostly with fish."

              "Fish?" Paul said, feeling a little ill at the thought of eating anything caught in that sea of floating human bodies that the Sacramento Valley had become.

              "Not from the valley," Pat said, again picking up on his guest's thoughts. "We've mounted some fishing expeditions across the valley and out to the Pacific Ocean. The pickings are rather good out that way."

              "You've gone all the way out to the ocean?" Paula asked. "How?"

              "In boats," Pat told her. "We've salvaged several large cabin cruisers that used to belong to the people that lived up here. We carry extra gasoline in storage tanks and make our way across the valley and into what used to be San Francisco Bay. From there, we go right out through the Golden Gate and into the open sea. Of course these boats were not meant to be ocean-going vessels, but you do what you have to do, right? Since the winds have died down the ocean surface is pretty calm anyway. We follow the coastline either north or south and stay in sight of land until we're out of the drainage area from the bay. We use the carp that we catch around here for bait and we pull up rock cod and occasionally some salmon."

              "Each trip takes about a week," Bonnie put in. "We've done three of them so far and managed to catch almost a ton of usable meat. We filet it and smoke it for short-term usage and dry some for long-term storage."

              "It keeps us alive," Renee added, "but it gets a little boring after a while."

              "Amazing," Paul said. "How are things out that way? We haven't gone any further west than the edge of the valley."

              A haunted look passed among the three hosts. "Everything is gone," Pat said slowly. "Where San Francisco and Oakland used to be is nothing but some chunks of concrete and a lot of mud. All of the buildings, all of the cars, the freeways, the bay bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge..." He shook his head. "All of it is gone. There's absolutely no sign that it had ever been there in the first place. Most of the hills surrounding the city are gone too. The trees were all ripped off of them by the tidal wave and the rain just made them collapse. There aren't even bodies left, at least none that you can see. There are huge mountains of debris up against the coastal mountains and in the inland valleys. That's where all the bodies went. The stench when we go past these areas is so bad that we have to use gas masks."

              "Jesus," Paul said. Although he had intellectually known that what Pat had described was what had happened, hearing it confirmed was still a shock.

              "It's unbelievable isn't it?" Renee asked them. "How fast our entire civilization was just wiped out? One minute we were there, six billion of us, and the next... pow, nothing but a few groups of scattered survivors."

              "The damage that one little chunk of ice did," Paula said.

              "And it hasn't stopped yet," said Pat. "We've still got this rain to deal with. We have no idea how long it's going to last. Will it go on for a year? For two years? Will the entire land eventually be covered with snow? We don't know. You said on the radio that the snow level starts at 6000 feet?"

              "That's right," Paul said. "Skip - he's our pilot - has flown all the way up to Blue Canyon. The accumulations up there are pretty deep. There are a lot of avalanches up that way and everything is completely covered."