The day after: An apocalyptic morning (117 page)

              "No," Linda said.

              Jessica smiled. "I've had this discussion with Cathy already. I've also had it with a few other women at the high school. Maybe its time that you and I had it. What do you say?"

              Linda thought for a long time. "You want to talk," she said at last, "then talk."

              "Nervous?" Paul asked Anna early the next morning as the helicopter once more lifted into the air, this time with Paul and Anna in the back of it.

              "I've never flown in one of these before," she said with a voice that was not quite steady. Her hands were holding tight to the door handle next to her as the chopper rattled and bounced its way through the take-off maneuver.

              "Don't worry," Paul assured her. "It used to scare that crap out of me as well. Human beings are just not meant to fly, you know?"

              "I know," she said, cracking the briefest of smiles.

              "But you're safe enough up here," Paul said. "Skip hardly ever crashes this thing."

              "Hardly ever?" she asked, trying to figure out if he was joking or not.

              "Hardly ever," Skip, who was listening in, confirmed with a straight face. "However, I'd advise you not to pull too hard on the handle you're holding on to. You probably don't want to open the door in flight, do you?"

              She looked at what she was grabbing and then jerked her hand away as if it had been hot, visions of tumbling to her death in her head.

              "It's okay," Jack assured her, hiding a smirk. "Really. You're in good hands."

              While Anna perspired and wrung her hands and while Paul found cold comfort in the fact that someone else was more fearful than he was for once, Skip headed at ninety knots for Cameron Park. Once there he banked right and followed the ribbon of Highway 50 to El Dorado Hills. When they got close, Jack patched in the radio headsets to the frequency of the portable radio they had dropped to the town five days before.

              "Coming up on the town," Skip announced as he decreased his altitude and airspeed. Ahead of him the hills that guarded the town and part of the township itself were visible. "They've more than likely spotted us by now. It looks like they've all hidden themselves again."

              "Copy," Paul replied. "Go into a hover just outside of weapons range of them and I'll give them a call on the radio."

              "Are you sure that these people really want to talk to us?" Anna asked nervously, not liking at all the term "weapons range" or the fact that they were hiding.

              "We'll find out in a minute, won't we?" Skip asked her, bleeding away the last of his forward speed. "We're hovering," he told Paul.

              "Right," Paul said, raising his hand to his key button. He pressed it. "El Dorado Hills, El Dorado Hills, this is Paul Terra aboard the Garden Hill helicopter. Anyone down there?"

              This time the response was almost immediate. "Good morning, Paul," said a male voice. "This is Pat. You're a few days earlier than we expected you. To what do we owe the honor of this visit?"

              "Sorry for dropping in unexpected," Paul said. "But we've had something of fundamental importance occur in our town and we thought that it might be a good idea to discuss it with you."

              "Please explain what you mean," Pat answered back after a moment.

              "We've had two women from Auburn find their way to our town," Paul explained. "They had quite a shocking tale to tell about life there. It seems that what we discussed the other day about our suspicions towards that town were actually somewhat naïve compared to the truth. They are in fact a very militaristic society that makes a habit of attacking other groups of survivors for their supplies."

              There was a longer pause this time. "I understand," Pat said at last. "Do you wish another face to face meeting today? We are agreeable to that down here."

              "We do," Paul said. "We have brought one of the women from Auburn with us as well."

              "Very well," Pat told them. "I'll send a truck to go pick you up at the location of your choice."

              "Copy that," Paul said. "Let me talk to Skip and I'll advise you where that will be in a moment." He turned to Skip. "So how about it? You trust them enough to drop us in the same place as before?"

              "I think," Skip said slowly, almost agonizingly, "that we're going to have to learn to trust these guys even more than that. And they're going to have to learn to trust us. What do you say we take this trust a giant leap forward right now?"

              "What do you mean?"

              "Why don't we ask them if we can land in the town?"

              Paul looked at him wide-eyed. "Are you serious?"

              "What've we got to lose?" Skip asked. "At worst they'll capture us and have the chopper for their own. At best, we'll prove to each other that we're on the up and up. A radical experiment, true, but at this point we're running out of time to coddle this potential alliance along. If there's any help for our situation to be had here, we need to find out quickly."

              Paul continued to look at him, trying to calmly evaluate what Skip was suggesting and having a hard time at it. In the end, he was forced to simply go with a gut feeling. "I think they're on the up and up," he said at last. "Let's ask."

              Skip nodded, having his own mix of emotions about the decision.

              Paul keyed up the microphone. "Pat, are you still there?"

              "Right here, Paul," he answered. "I have a team standing by in the truck. Where will it be?"

              "Well actually," he said, "we were wondering if maybe you would allow us to land in the town."

              The pause was about ten seconds this time. "I'm sorry," Pat said. "Did you say you wanted to land in the town?"

              "If you'll allow it," Paul replied. "We promise we don't have an attack force on board."

              Another long silence. Finally: "Will the parking lot outside of the elementary school be sufficient?"

              Skip touched down gently less than a hundred feet away from the cafeteria building. With hands that were trembling a little from nervous anticipation, he went through the power-down procedure and turned off the engine, allowing the rotor to slowly spin to a halt. "Well now," he said, watching as two men and three women, all of them carrying rifles, came out of the building, "I guess we find out if we just made a big mistake or not, don't we?"

              "I guess we do," Paul replied, putting his headset down. "Let's get these guns off."

              "No," Skip said, shaking his head. "Leave them on."

              "What?" Jack said. "Won't that piss them off?"

              "If they want us to disarm, they'll tell us," he said. "Until then, leave them on. It's a trust issue."

              "I see," Jack said, not understanding but obeying.

              The group of El Dorado Hills residents walked closer to the helicopter, their own faces reflecting the nervousness that the Garden Hill residents were feeling. Their rifles were slung over their shoulders, not pointed at anything. They stopped just outside the arc of the rotor and waited.

              Skip and Jack both opened their door and stepped out, both taking care to keep their hands in the open. From the back of the helicopter, Paul and Anna (who was looking a little green and was more than a little unsteady on her feet) joined them. Paul recognized Pat as one of the men and Bonnie as one of the women.

              "Thank you for allowing us to land," Paul said, walking a few steps forward.

              "It's our pleasure," Pat said, giving a slight smile.

              Skip watched all of this carefully, waiting for the guns of the El Dorado people to swing upward, waiting to be taken into custody. But they didn't and they weren't. Paul walked forward towards the crowd and Pat, after a moment, stepped forward as well and met him halfway. They exchanged a handshake and a few words of greeting. The guns on the waists of Paul, Jack, and himself were looked at but not commented upon.

              "Why don't we go inside out of the rain?" Pat suggested.

              "Yes," Paul agreed. "Why don't we do that? We have a lot to talk about."

              An hour later Paul, Skip, Jack, Anna, Pat, Bonnie, and Renee were sitting around a conference table in the same room that the meeting the other day had taken place in. All of them, with the exception of Jack, were sipping from cups of herbal tea and occasionally chewing on small pieces of dried fish. Skip and Paul had just finished telling the tale of Auburn and the coming attack to their hosts with occasional stories thrown in by Anna when they were requested.

              "So you can see," Skip said when the story was told, "why we're concerned."

              "Four hundred men," Pat said contemplatively. "That is quite an army in this day and age. And they are well armed you say?"

              "They raided the sheriff's department, the Auburn Police Department, a large gun store, and an army/navy surplus store after the comet," Anna replied with a nod. "They've also taken all of the weapons and all of the ammo from every town that they've conquered since then. They don't have a limitless supply of ammo and guns, but they do have a lot, certainly enough that every man marching on Garden Hill will have a rifle of some kind."

              "And what about your own ammo supply?" Renee asked. "Forgive me for prying, but will you be able to fight them off?"

              "No," Skip said. "We have quite a few guns, including a few automatic assault rifles, but we're critically short on ammunition. There is no way that we could absorb a three-pronged attack such as the one they're planning to hit us with."

              "So what is it that you want from us?" Pat asked carefully. "Obviously it is something or you wouldn't be here. Do you want to evacuate your people here? Is that what you want?"

              "That is an option that has been discussed," Paul replied, "but Skip has pointed out to me quite graphically that it is not a terribly viable option." He explained a little further as to just why this was so.

              "So are you asking us to come to Garden Hill and help you fight then?" Pat asked next. "I'm not sure that any of our people would agree to that."

              "No," Paul said, "that's not what we're asking either. What we were hoping for with this trip was to fast-track the discussions on trade that we started on the last trip."

              "What kind of trade?"

              "Any kind of trade," Paul said. "You see, our options in Garden Hill are to either try to fight these people or to flee town for someplace else. Since fleeing town is not as easy as it sounds, that leaves us with the former option. We're going to have to fight."

              "And to fight," Skip said, "we need ammunition and guns."

              "And what makes you think that we have ammunition and guns to spare?" Pat wanted to know.

              "We don't know if you do or not," Paul told them. "That's what we're here to find out. We do know, from looking in the El Dorado County Yellow Pages, that there used to be a gun store here in town. Bob's Guns it was called if I'm not mistaken. So if you managed to salvage the stock from Bob's Guns, maybe you would be willing to trade some of it for a few tons of bulk rice and wheat."

              Pat, Renee, and Bonnie all shared a look with each other, interest clearly in their eyes.

              "We also have access," Skip added, sweetening the pot a little, "to canned spinach, canned chicken noodle soup, Gerber baby food, and, as of yesterday, peanut butter and Dennison's chili."

              "That does sound rather intriguing," Bonnie said, actually licking her lips a little.

              "But supposing that we did have this ammunition," Pat said. "How would we know that you wouldn't use it against us? How do we know that all of this isn't some plot to deprive us of our own stock?"

              "You don't," Paul said. "That's where trust comes in. This isn't some corporate boardroom or some diplomatic chambers. We're not businessmen or ambassadors here. We're human beings, just like you are. You have intuition and you have common sense. Does it feel to you like we're setting you up?"

              "No," Pat said after a moment's consideration. "It doesn't." His companions both agreed with this assessment.

              "That's because we're not," Paul said. "We're a scared, outnumbered group of people that are facing a potential slaughter. We came here to ask you if you could help us and we're willing to help you with your food shortage problem in return. That's all there is to it."

              Another look was shared among the El Dorado Hills group. It was followed up by a few more as an unspoken, telepathic type of communication occurred between the three of them. It went on for quite some time until finally, careful, cautious nods were exchanged.