The day after: An apocalyptic morning (97 page)

              "Copy," Jack said, using the controls to move the pod back and forth. He was seeing a black and white view of the nearest guard bunkers, the four guards manning them clearly visible as light figures on the darker background. "I've got the bunkers, I'm gonna pan over the residential area now." He moved the controls, seeing rows of houses, some of them brighter on the display than others. He saw a few people on the streets, a few of them obviously women, most men carrying guns. The men seemed to be some sort of interior guard force.

              "How's it look?" Skip asked him, not wanting to take his eyes off the instrument panel.

              Jack told him what he saw in fairly good detail.

              "The houses that show up lighter on the display," Skip told him. "Those are the occupied ones, or at least the ones that have some sort of heat source inside of them."

              "Got it," Jack replied. "There's not too many of them in this section, most are dark. It must be the outskirts of town. Spin around about twenty degrees left, I'm at the end of the panning range."

              "Spinning," Skip said, slowly manipulating the anti-torque pedals so the tail swung to the right. Again, the vertigo gave him conflicting signals. It felt to his body that he was not rotating at all. Only the compass told him that he was in fact changing his orientation. It moved slowly from 180 degrees to 170 to 160, where he stopped it.

              "Okay," Jack said, "I'm getting some good shots now. I have a whole cluster of houses just below the hill by the bridge. Almost all of them are brighter on the display than the others. There's a few more women walking around, mostly in pairs. A lot of them seem to be carrying tubs of some sort. There's also a big building on the top of the hill. It's glowing a lot brighter than anything else and there are some guards posted out in front of it."

              "I can see it on visual," Skip said, daring to look away from his instruments for a second. Sure enough, there was a glow that could only be caused by electric lights showing plainly before him. "They've got power in that building. Probably from a portable generator or something. It's got to be their headquarters."

              "I got it on tape," Jack said, referring to the video recorder that was included in the FLIR processor.

              "Can you get shots of the other bunkers from here?" Skip asked, putting his eyes back on the instrument panel.

              "I should be able to get all but the bridge bunker," he answered. "You'll have to rotate back and forth for me though."

              "I'm yours to command," Skip told him, wanting to wipe the sweat from his brow but not daring to take his hands from the controls.

              For the next five minutes Jack had him rotate left and right while he filmed the defensive arrangements and staffing levels in infrared. He then took a few more shots of the sparse activity on the darkened streets. He was able to figure out that there were two distinct sets of interior guards and that the women on the streets seemed to be in the process of dumping garbage into the garages of houses. He articulated all of this to Skip as it occurred.

              "Good job," Skip told him. "Now let's go get some shots of the bridge and the bunker over there."

              "How are you going to get over there?"

              "We're gonna go west until we're clear of the town and then cut south over the canyon. We'll creep up the other side until we're in sight of our target. We'll use the canyon itself as a reference point. So keep that FLIR pointed at it and tell me if I start to drift too far away."

              "Copy," Jack agreed a little nervously.

              It took them the better part of twenty minutes, with several lapses of communication that had Skip turning or moving the wrong direction, but finally they were hovering a half-mile southwest of the bridge bunker on the far side of the canyon. Jack, once Skip's positioning was stable, locked the FLIR onto it and started recording. He saw that the two men in the bunker were standing, looking off towards the town instead of towards the approaches.

              "They seem kind of antsy about something," Jack said as he watched them shifting back and forth. "And they're both smoking. I can see a bright flare in front of their faces when they take a drag."

              "Smoking cigarettes?" Skip asked, hoping that they were undisciplined enough to be using marijuana on duty.

              "I think so," Jack said. "They each have one and they're not passing it back and forth." A brighter flare on the edge of his view caught his attention. "What's that?" he said, panning the FLIR towards the bridge itself.

              "What's what?" Skip asked. Like any pilot, he did not particularly care for hearing those two words spoken while in flight. About the only worse phrase to hear was "oh shit".

              "There's a truck coming across the bridge," Jack said, seeing it's bright headlights on his display. "Looks like two men in it."

              "What time is it?" Skip asked.

              Jack looked at his watch, pushing the light button to get a reading. "I got 6:50," he said.

              "Must be crew change time," Skip said.

              It was. They hovered and filmed the changing of the bridge guard. Jack narrated as the two men in the truck parked at the bottom of the hill, got out, and then, with the help of flashlights, started climbing up one of the narrower sections. It took them about five minutes to reach the top. Once up there the two off-going guards exchanged a few pleasantries with their relief, handed over weapons and radios, and then started down the hill. While the new crew settled into the bunker for their shift, the old crew jumped in the truck and drove it back to town.

              "I think we got enough," Skip said once the truck disappeared over the bridge. "Why don't we get out of this place."

              "Sounds good," Jack agreed. "You gonna skirt around to the north again to pick up the Interstate?" Following the Interstate with the FLIR was how they had navigated to Auburn in the first place.

              "Well actually," Skip said slowly, "I was thinking we could make a little side trip."

              Jack looked over at his mentor's silhouette. "A side trip?" he asked carefully.

              While Paul was in the community center office with Christine, anxiously awaiting the return of Skip and Jack from their nighttime recon mission, Janet and Sherrie were at Janet's nearby house, getting Sherrie settled in. It was her first day free of the traction splint that had been on her for so long, her first night out of the community center bed and on her own two feet. Paul had constructed her a rigid, removable cast out of sanded plywood and bungee cords. It was a crude, bulky device but it allowed her to walk with crutches and kept her from putting pressure on the mending but still weak femur. It had been decided that she would stay with her two caregivers, Paul and Janet, until such time as she was able to walk on her own. There were still quite a few tasks that she needed assistance with.

              "Oh my God, Janet," she sighed blissfully. "You can't imagine how good this feels." Sherrie was currently reclining in the master bathroom's oversized tub, her injured leg free of the cast for the moment and stretched out before her. Bath bubbles frothed around the edge of the tub and small tendrils of steam rose into the air around her. Though the community bathing center was the easiest place to take a hot bath since it had a constant supply of heated water, it was still possible to take a hot bath in the privacy of your own home as long as you didn't mind expending a little effort. Cold water could be supplied from the rain gutter system and hot water could be heated three gallons at a time in a large cooking pot in the fireplace.

              Janet smiled at her. It had been a lot of work to fill the tub up but seeing Sherrie's contented face made it worthwhile. "Here," she said, handing her a glass of warm chardonnay from a bottle she had pilfered from the supply room. "Have a little wine with it."

              "Wine?" she said delighted. "I haven't had any wine in... well... you know."

              "I know," Janet said, taking a sip from a glass of her own.

              They talked of inconsequential things for a while, each of them finishing two glasses and starting to feel the beginnings of a good alcohol buzz.

              "I used to drink far too much wine before the comet," Sherrie said as Janet poured each of them a third glass.

              "Yeah?" Janet asked.

              "Yeah," she said a little sadly. "I think it was an escape mechanism for the marriage I was in. I mean, I was the wife of a doctor and that was real important to me then, and I had a nice house in Garden Hill and I was a part of the upper crust and all that, but I didn't really like my husband all that much."

              "No?"

              "No," she sighed, shaking her head a little at her former self. "I married him because he was a doctor. That was all I was interested in. That was all that my mother had taught me to be interested in. I loved him for the lifestyle he was able to give me but I wasn't attracted to him in any way. I didn't enjoy looking at him, I didn't enjoy talking to him, and I certainly didn't enjoy having sex with him. He was a climb on, rut a few times, and fire off kind of guy. If I could get five minutes out of him it was a good night."

              "It seems there was a lot of that in this town," Janet said with a wine-induced giggle. "I don't know how many women have told me that exact same thing."

              "Sad but true," she sighed. "Being a trophy wife does have its disadvantages. Funny how my mother never mentioned any of that to me. And so I would spend my afternoons while he was at the office sipping wine from a box in the refrigerator. I would never get bombed and pass out or anything, but I would go through each day with a strong buzz and have to take a nap before Josh got home from the office."

              "You weren't the only one I'm sure," Janet said. "Why do you think we have so much wine, so much booze, so much pot and crank and cocaine and Prozac and Xanax in the supply room? They're all symptoms of the trophy wife syndrome. That's what happens when you marry for status or money instead of for love, you end up needing a crutch to get you through the days and the weeks. I wasn't all that different."

              "You weren't?" she asked, surprised.

              "Nope," she said. "I wasn't quite in the same class as the women in this town before the comet, but I married for pretty much the same reason. I grew up poor in South Sacramento. My mother supported my half-sister and I with child support payments and alimony from two different husbands. I was taught that the thing to do was find yourself a well-off man, marry him, and then divorce him once you put in "enough time" - as my mother put it - to get yourself a good settlement. My mom always taught me to do better than she had in that department. She had only found herself a construction worker and a car salesman, both of whom were abusive and rarely employed." She gave a cynical smile. "I did do a little better for myself. I went to college on a freakin' cheerleading scholarship and got myself a bachelor's degree in education. I became a kindergarten teacher because I really loved kids but I must admit that in the back of my mind, I was hoping to meet me a nice divorced father to take me away from it all and set me up. That's why I turned down job offers from the Sac Unified system and waited until Placer Hills Unified offered."

              "So did you meet the nice, divorced father?" Sherrie asked, taking a large sip of her wine and smoothing some bubbles over her chest.

              "No," she said, "not quite. Instead, I found the principal of the first school that I worked at down in Newcastle. His marriage was teetering on the brink when I started working there. I pushed it over the edge by seducing him into an affair. He divorced his wife and married me once it was final. They had to transfer me up here to Garden Hill when we became an item. He probably died when the water came in."

              "Just like everyone else's husband," Sherrie said sadly.

              "Just like it," Janet agreed with a sigh and a large sip. "I never really loved him. I was just putting in my time like my mom taught me. I really didn't know what love was like until I met Paul after the comet. Its kind of funny that it takes the end of the world for me to find out what's really important in life, isn't it?"

              Sherrie grunted a little. "At least you figured it out then," she said. "I had to get shot and almost die to figure it out."

              "But you've learned?"

              "Yeah," she said. "A little too late, but I've learned."

              Janet held up her glass for a toast. "To the important things in life," she said.

              "To the important things," Sherrie agreed. They clinked their glasses together and had a drink.

              "There are people there!" Jack yelled excitedly as he peered at the FLIR display. "There are people, Skip! You were right!"

              They were hovering 3500 feet above the ground a half-mile west of the remains of El Dorado Hills. It had been a rather harrowing twenty-five minute flight from Auburn, with Skip creeping along at forty knots over the shoreline between the Sacramento Valley/Sea and the foothills, Jack guiding his turns with the FLIR. They had done this until they'd found Highway 50 rising out of the black water and then they'd turned east, using the Highway as their reference point to guide them in.