The day after: An apocalyptic morning (95 page)

              "Amen," Mick agreed.

              "You guys will be fine," Skip said, bleeding off speed and altitude as the target came into view. "I used to practice this maneuver with the SWAT team twice a month. It's nothing."

              "Easy for you to say, flyboy," Paul said sourly. "You get to stay up here where it's safe."

              "Hey," Skip said, amused, "I'd watch what I say to the man who gives you the ride home."

              Skip circled around the area for a few minutes, allowing Jack, the observer, to look for any signs of trouble on the ground before the outside crew committed itself. Nothing was spotted and the go ahead was given for the mission. Skip dropped down further and settled into a hover just over the top of one of the cargo carriers. "In position," he said. "Let's get it done."

              Paul, who did not have the combat training that Mick did but who was much more familiar with the descent gear, went first. Moving gingerly to the door he picked up the loop of rope that was coiled near it and pushed it out, watching as it fell towards the train car. The other end of the rope was secured to a hook on the side of the fuselage. He lay on his stomach, his head just poking outside, and guided Skip a little closer. "About ten more feet down and about six to the right," he told him, watching as the adjustments were made. Finally the rope was just touching the top of the car. "Right there," he said. "Hold that position."

              "Holding," Skip answered.

              Unable to put it off any further, Paul pulled himself to a sitting position and eased forward until his feet were dangling out over the doorway. He reached out with trembling hands and pulled in the rope, attaching it to the wheeled clamp on the front of his rope harness. He pulled the intercom from his head and set it on the floor and then, unable to believe he was actually doing something so mad, he pushed out of the doorway so he was standing on the skid.

              "Jesus fucking Christ," he yelled as the downdraft, which was relatively weak this close the center of the rotor but still quite powerful, hit him. He could feel the entire aircraft tilt back and forth from the shifting of his weight from the inside to the outside. "What the hell am I doing out here?"

              Nobody answered him, no one even heard him over the noise of the engine. He didn't even hear himself. All the same, the words had the desired effect. They motivated him into action. Moving carefully, holding on to the side of the doorjamb he turned himself around so that he was looking back into the helicopter. Mick, his face somewhat ashen, gave him another unenthusiastic thumbs-up. "Here goes nothing," Paul said, again without anyone hearing, and he stepped off the skid.

              The harness bit into his groin and his chest as he dropped down foot by foot. The two steel wheels attached to the rope kept him from descending too quickly. If he began to drop too fast the friction pulled them together, causing them to clamp shut on the rope and arrest the fall. He went down jerkily, a little rougher than he had done during the practice session off the top of the community center the day before. The gently rocking skid passed in front of his face and then it was above him and rising. The brown roof of the boxcar below began to grow bigger, now looking like an actual structure instead of a scale model. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, his feet touched the roof. He took a moment to stabilize himself and get his balance and then, with a sigh of relief, he disengaged the wheels from the rope.

              The noise and the buffeting by the wind was still quite intense so he sat down where he was, not wanting to be blown off the top of the car and over the embankment. Once he was down he hauled out his radio and turned it on. "I'm down safe," he yelled into it. "Send in the next victim."

              Mick emerged from the helicopter a minute later and began to come down, his own descent considerably more jerky and halting than Paul's had been. A couple of times he fell free for a few feet and caused the wheels to lock, which in turn made the entire helicopter rock back and forth. The end of the rope, which was two feet in front of Paul, danced up and down, back and forth whenever this would happen. At last Mick's feet came down and Paul was able to get his hands on him. He helped him disengage the wheels and then radioed up to Skip. "We're both down. Go ahead and pull back."

              If Skip answered it was lost in the noise, but a moment later the helicopter raised into the air and moved off to the west.

              "I don't ever," Mick said, his face white and pasty, "want to do anything like that again. Why the hell did I volunteer for this shit?"

              "Hell," Paul said, "you ain't seen nothing yet. Wait till he pulls us out of here. Then you can be really scared." Since the gear they had was only good for lowering someone down, the only way to get the two men back out of there was to have them clip onto the rope and to fly them dangling from the bottom of the helicopter to the nearest clearing where Skip could then land and let them inside.

              "I don't even want to think about that right now," he said. "Let's get to work."

              They unfastened their rope harnesses and left them atop the freight car. They then climbed down, utilizing a ladder bolted to the end of the car. They had planned to move from place to place by walking between the freight cars and the side of the hill. One quick look told them this was impossible. Mud and rocks had piled up in this space in many places preventing passage. This forced them to inch along the edge of the embankment, in the three-foot space between the edge of the cars and the drop-off.

              "You know something, Paul?" Mick asked, trying desperately not to look down at the drop.

              "What's that?" replied Paul, who was doing the same.

              "I'm not having a lot of fun here today."

              Paul chuckled a little. "You mean you don't like flying around in a poorly maintained contraption piloted by a man who has never been checked out on it, dangling from the bottom of it, and then walking along a cliff? What don't you find enjoyable about that?"

              "I guess I'm just weird," Mick said. "You want to check the grain carriers first?"

              "Yeah," he agreed. "They should be the easiest to get open."

              They came to the first one and utilized the ladder to ascend to the roof of it. These were steel cars, painted yellow, that had circular spouts on the top where bulk grain was loaded in from huge bins at the point where the car was filled. They crawled along the top until they came to the spout. It was sealed shut with a latching mechanism but it was not locked in any way. Though the latch was sticky from sitting closed for so long, it came open easily when the both of them pulled on it. Paul threw the hinged lid upward and caught a strong, musty odor. He pulled a three-cell flashlight out of his pack and shined it down in the hole.

              "Well?" Mick said.

              "It's rice," Paul said, seeing the brownish-white granules that filled the entire space. "Goddamn if it isn't rice. Probably twenty or thirty tons of it."

              "Is it still good?"

              "I don't know," he said, reaching his hand inside. "It's dry but there's some mold on the top. Let me see if it extends underneath." He pushed aside the rice under his hand, digging down a little before pulling up a handful. It was a nice uniform color with very little mold.

              "Looks like we're in the rice business," Mick said happily. "If nothing else is here, that'll keep us from starving to death."

              "But it'll be boring as hell," Paul said. "Let's check the other ones."

              They moved from one grain carrier to the next, checking each one and reporting their progress every few minutes to Skip and Jack, who were circling a half-mile away. The first four contained rice - one of the staples of Sacramento Valley agriculture before the comet - but two of the four had leaked enough water into the hold to spoil all within them. The last two contained wheat, another common crop in the valley. In one of the two the mold was so bad that the contents were completely unusable. In the second one however, though the top layer was contaminated, the underneath seemed relatively all right.

              "Looks like we've got a bread and flour supply as well," Paul said happily, almost forgetting that he was on the edge of a cliff. He slammed shut the lid and re-engaged the hatch. "Let's go check those boxcars now," he told Mick.

              There were ten of those in two distinct groupings. They climbed down from the grain car and worked their way carefully back to the first boxcar. Unlike the grain carriers, these cars were locked tightly with steel latches. Paul examined the mechanism for a moment and then concluded that the best tool for the job would be a five-pound hammer and a heavy-duty chisel. Fortunately he had had the foresight to bring these items with him. He pulled them out of his pack and went to work.

              It took five minutes of hammering and banging but finally the entire latch fell off, landing on the ground at his feet. "Nothing to it," he said, wiping sweat from his brow.

              "I can see that," Mick said. "Let's get it open."

              They both grabbed hold of the sliding cargo door and pulled, moving it on its track until it was fully open. Inside were cardboard boxes stacked on pallets from floor to roof. They were labeled SONY.

              "Well isn't this ironic?" Paul said, looking at their bounty. "I always wanted me a DVD player but the wife wouldn't let me spend the money. And now look. I have about two thousand of them."

              "Two thousand, two hundred and six," Mick corrected, reading from a manifest he found just inside the door. "Fresh off a cargo carrier from the Port of Stockton, headed for a warehouse in Chicago."

              "Wonderful," Paul said, shaking his head partly in amusement, partly in frustration. "Let's see what's in the next one."

              The contents of the next one turned out to be more Sony products. There were one thousand Surround Sound processors and eight hundred stereo VCRs.

              "Look," Mick said, pointing at one of the boxes. "They have the Smart Record feature."

              "Shut the fuck up," Paul grumbled. He handed the hammer and chisel to his wisecracking companion. "You do the next one. My arms need a rest."

              The next one did not contain consumer electronics. Nor did it contain anything particularly useful either. "Two million Bic ballpoint pens," Paul read from the manifest. "Ain't that some shit?"

              "That's a lot of fucking pens," Mick agreed. "Shall we move on?"

              They moved on. Mick once again handled the job of chiseling the lock off the freight car. In the rhythm now, it took only about three minutes before it fell and they were able to pull the door open. This time they struck gold, at least as far as staving off starvation went. This car was carrying cans of Campbell's concentrated chicken noodle soup - the same thing that the Garden Hill residents had been eating at least once a day since the impact, so common was that stock in their food supply.

              "Unbelievable," Paul whispered, looking at the pallets of tin cans stacked atop each other.

              Mick stared for a moment as well and then reached for the manifest and took a look at it.

              "How many?" Paul asked him.

              "Thirty thousand cans," Mick replied. "Coming from the factory in Sacramento and heading for a distributor in Omaha."

              "Thirty thousand cans," Paul repeated. "If there's a God, I will have to say that he is kind and benevolent for giving this gift to us. But he sure has one twisted-ass sense of humor."

              "Yep," Mick agreed.

              In the next car they found three huge rolls of blank newsprint that was heading from Seattle to the offices of the Reno Gazette. In the one following it were eleven thousand boxes of Saran Wrap. The next three all contained Maytag products - washers in the first, dryers in the second, dishwashers in the third. All of the appliances were top-of-the-line, but none were very useful to a community with no electricity.

              With some of their frustration returning they opened the very last cargo carrier.

              "Well," Mick said, looking at what they had found. "It's food, I'll say that."

              "Yeah," Paul agreed. "I guess we won't have to worry about anemia or scurvy now, will we?"

              "And if we ever meet Popeye, we'll have a huge edge on trade."

              Inside of the final car, stacked to the roof on pallets, were thirty thousand cans of Del Monte spinach.

              "Well," Paul said. "At least we know we won't starve to death. It may not be much variety but at least it's edible. Let's get all these cars closed back up and get ourselves home. And then we can start figuring out how to get some of this stuff back with us the next time."

              "Amen," Mick said.

              Part 12

              "Don't let anyone try to fault you, Bracken," Barnes said as he puffed on a cigar. "You did the right thing by aborting the mission. It may not be glorious to turn away from a fight, but you stayed within our doctrine and brought everyone home."