The Rackham Files (28 page)

I said to the boy, perhaps too gruffly, "Have you been sick like this, too?"

He hesitated, started a negative headshake, swallowed hard, glanced away.

"You have to be strong, and truthful, if we're going to help you," my sis said. It had a threat in it. I wished she'd always been this firm with Lancey-pants.

Mumbling, he said, "She made me wear that damn awning in the culvert while she went to find a better place in the middle of the night and wouldn't let me give it to her until we got over your fence about dawn and then she started puking and—and all. I barfed a little just before you found us. I think it was her being sick that made me sick."

Shar said she hoped he was right and asked why the devil I was still wearing contaminated clothes. While I took my scare costume off in an upstairs bedroom, Shar got the fallout meter and set it between Mrs. Baird's thighs while Devon murmured hopeful things and answered Shar's questions. It seems that Mrs. Baird, a divorcee wary of adult male help, had been panicked by a radio warning at roughly ten the night before; had driven wildly from Concord without the least idea where she was taking her son. She simply took the road of least resistance away from the debris of a shattering, flattening blast wave that had freakishly left their apartment whole while sending storefronts screaming like buzz saws through crowded streets, and through the people composing those crowds. By the time the Bairds drove through it, the massacre of innocents was hours old, and the scenes they passed were silent and dead.

When stopped by a wreck, they had run together up the highway, taking refuge in a culvert for a time. Assuming Ern's estimate was close, she must've taken nearly two thousand rems during those first few hours when the fallout was at its most lethal level, showering its gamma radiation in all directions. Devon's dose might have been survivable as he cowered in that culvert, but Shar's single glance at me endorsed my thoughts about the woman; we were in the presence of death momentarily deferred.

"Her reading is about ten rems per hour," my sis said as I handed an old bathrobe to the youth. "That's about the same as it is everywhere on this floor, maybe a bit more—maybe because of all that," she indicated the pile of clothing in the bathtub. "Let's get her to the basement, Harve, and make her—better." We both knew that was a white lie. We could only try to make her comfortable. But Devon perked up a bit, stumbling along in a robe that swallowed his thin frame. Later Shar presented Devon with her old jeans and sweater from my guest bedroom.

Ern, feverishly slashing precise cuts in cardboard boxes he had pirated from the root cellar, stared in glum silence as we made a pallet for Mrs. Baird near my waterbed. The boy hurriedly visited the john and from the sound of it was trying to muffle his dry heaves. Kate had stashed containers of water in the tub, and I figured Devon knew enough to use it as necessary.

I told Ern how I'd found the pair; watched him work, mystified at the juice tins Lance had emptied into my old stewpot. My nephew was now modifying them in accord with the one Ern had made.

Ern made no complaint about the foundlings, no reproof for my weak-minded decision to take charity cases I had sworn not to take. He chose another topic. "I hope you got the battery. It's going to get damn tiresome in the dark when those dry cells run down, 'cause we can't afford to keep somebody pedaling a bike all the time. Uses too much oxygen; gives off too much water vapor and carbon dioxide."

Cammie was making a tinned beef sandwich for Devon. I asked, "Cammie, will you bring that battery down from the kitchen?"

My niece stopped assembling the sandwich, glanced at her dad, made no move to comply until he gave her the slightest of nods in the basement gloom. I dug the glove-box lamp from my pocket and gave it to Ern, who recognized its utility without a word being spoken. And then I sat down with Lance and mimicked the things he was doing with juice cans. I had some thinking to do.

This was
my
place. If I chose to get sticky about it, they were all guests subject to my rules. As I'd warned Kate, democracy couldn't reign unchecked when our lives depended on everyone taking some direction. If I made the rules, couldn't I break them?

Well, I had; first with Kate and now by ushering this desperately sick woman and her teenage son into my shelter after agreeing with Ern and Shar that extra people would overcrowd our "lifeboat." Now I sensed that my kinfolk were realigning their ideas about my leadership. That worried me. Was I or wasn't I the one who ran things in my own home?

I compared my work with Lance's and punched holes in the next juice can more like his. Then I realized I was actually letting a spoiled kid show me what to do. I didn't like that one damn bit.

However, Lance was working in accord with our recognized expert: Ern. I could choose to do things differently for the sheer pleasure of self-determination, or I could do them the right way. Seen in this light, my urge for control looked pretty silly. Any leader who leads primarily for the joy of wielding power is a leader ripe for overthrow, especially if he makes too many bad decisions. I couldn't fault that logic. It had brought about the Magna Carta and the Continental Congresses and the Russian revolution and
goddamn
if I wasn't denying my own right to run things in my own castle, so to speak.

Had I made a bad decision, bringing the hapless Bairds in? I knew Shar thought so; suspected the others felt the same way. Yet no one had overtly challenged me for it. Maybe they were giving me another chance—or enough rope. And maybe Ern's mystifying work with toilet paper and tin cans would prove faulty, too, but he had a good track record. The least I could do was give him the freedom to keep improvising, even if that meant my temporarily becoming a peon on his tiny assembly line.

In this way I discovered a rationale of leadership that we seemed to be adopting without endless wrangles about it. I knew where things were; had physical strength the others lacked; and in the economic sense we were living in an investment I had made. On the other hand, my brother-in-law brought technical expertise that I lacked, and at this point our survival was chiefly a matter of technology and its applications.

To some extent my sis also knew more of the technology than I did. I'd be suicidally stupid if I failed to let them guide us while we navigated these nuclear shoals. Like it or lump it, I knew I should accept this erosion of my authority, letting it pass to Ern without making a big deal about it. I neglected the fact that Ern was not the authority figure in his household. Shar was:—and she hadn't exercised much authority with Lance.

Kate interrupted my reverie, having taken a sentry position on the second floor. She had used a spatula to pry a few inches of tape loose at several window edges, the better to squint at our horizons without going outside. Anger and dismay filled her voice as she called, "It's another radioactive cloud west of us!"

The Golden Gate bomb needed forty-five minutes to thrust its cloud so high that we could see it over nearby ridges. There's been lots of speculation about the warhead, some claiming it was meant for military reservations near the north end of the bridge, and some insisting it was part of a ragged second-strike volley targeted against cities instead of military sites.

We weren't concerned about strategy but about tactics. That cloud was headed our way, and if we were going to survive another day in the tunnel, we would need something better than the air supply in the house. It might've been adequate for two or three people, but with so much activity by a half-dozen of us, our sealed environment was becoming a hazard.

Shar made herself a poncho from polyfilm and a babushka to match, taping it together with Kate's help. She wasted no time explaining when I protested her trip outside. "The girls can tell you, bubba," she said, mimed a kiss, and went outside.

"You and Mr. McKay have taken the most radiation so far," Kate told me, "so she's the logical one." For what, I asked. "To make a slit in the film over the cellar doors and tape a flap of film over it, leaving the bottom of the flap untaped. It makes a one-way air-exit valve, to encourage flow of air through the tunnel. I volunteered but I'm not sure I know the best way to do it. Shar claims it'll only take a minute or two."

I nodded. If that new fallout cloud dumped on us, it would soon be too late for outside work. "Kate, can you use the fallout meter?"

She smiled almost shyly. "Cammie showed me. Should I start taking readings here in the kitchen?"

"Right. Uh—you getting along with everybody?"

An instant's hesitation before, "Everybody that counts."

"Everybody counts, Kate. You mean Lance?"

A nod.

"He's a problem. But Shar's the one who keeps him in line. Just wanted you to know you're not alone."

Leading the way to the basement, she stopped, looked back. "No, I'm not. It's a good feeling, boss."

"Not 'boss.' You know my name, Kate. This is no time to be stressing who's boss; we have enough problems without that."

"I noticed," she murmured, and collected the meter materials. By now someone had cut a swatch of fur from my parka to make the process simpler.

Mrs. Baird had not improved, but Cammie had rigged a bedpan from a biscuit tray. She and Devon hovered over the woman, trying to get her to accept a sip of water.

"Don't try to force-feed anyone who's unconscious," I cautioned. "She could strangle."

"Mom said we need to replace the fluids she's losing," Cammie said. "Her skin is flushed but she's trembling all over, Uncle Harve. I don't know whether to cover her up or sponge her with cool water."

I didn't know either, but one look at Devon's drawn features warned me against saying so. I felt his mother's pulse—quick and shallow—and despite her reddened skin, she didn't seem warm. If anything, her body temperature might be a bit low. I said, "Cover her lightly and keep trying to get her to swallow. There's instant coffee somewhere and I'd say she could use the stimulant. Better if it was warm. Devon, you might nibble on that sandwich whether you want it or not," I finished, spying the food he hadn't touched. I hoped all my guesswork wouldn't do any harm.

Meanwhile I had another job. Ern heard me out and agreed, with a suggestion I hadn't considered. "If you're going to block the chimney flue from the inside, try lightly stuffing a brown paper sack with newspaper and stick a broom head in with it. Then tape the sack's mouth over the broom handle and push like hell. The handle will give you something to pull the plug out with later," he explained.

Kate went to the second-floor fireplace with me and took a fallout reading while I arranged the plug I'd made. I had broken the broom handle off short enough to get it into the fireplace and was kneeling at the hearth when she gasped, "Wait! Isn't some fallout going to get on you when you go poking into that thing?"

I stopped short with a curse, aware that she had saved me from a dose of contamination. "So how else can I do it?"

She hurtled downstairs without answering. I spent the time checking our attic beam repair, which looked good, and came down as Kate unfolded more of my thin poly film. Hers was a sloppy-looking answer to the problem: film taped completely across the hearth opening, so loose and voluminous that I could grasp my handmade plug through the film. "Don't breathe," Kate warned, and stepped back sensibly as I began to stuff the paper plug up past the flue damper.

We could hear a cascade of small particles falling like sand; most of it just harmless crud, no doubt, but Kate rushed to retape the edge of film I pulled loose as a puff of dust emerged near me.

The broom head was too wide and I virtually tore it to pieces in thirty breathless seconds, using the handle like a ramrod. When I felt the plug leap upward inside, I knew it was past the damper into the main chimney shaft, and I simply lit out for the stairs. Kate collected our hardware and followed.

My sis had returned from outside. She shooed Cammie away from a very unpleasant moment while Mrs. Baird threw up pale green fluid into a saucepan. Devon himself wasn't having an easy time because I could hear him retching in the john. At least he had something to throw up, having eaten half a sandwich.

Kate reported that her last reading had been twenty-five rems on the second floor. "And we're soaking up too much radiation here in the basement," Shar replied. "Just because it's gradually dropping, we're acting as if we weren't accumulating more damage to our bodies. But we are, and the sooner we return to the tunnel the better off we'll be. Ernest McKay, that means you!"

Ern sighed and agreed. "I can finish this filter arrangement in the tunnel. Kate, will you take readings under the stairs and then in the tunnel?"

I was collecting the hardware for a string of tunnel lights when Kate revealed her findings. The readings were horrific; twenty in the basement, nearly the same in the tunnel.

Ern paused, thunderstruck, his arms full of cardboard and tin cans. "Good God, we're losing the tunnel advantage!"

Then I mentally flashed on the little meter, abandoned near the fireplace upstairs while Kate helped me minimize the leakage of dust through the film. Grabbing a roll of toilet paper, I moistened a few squares of it and wiped the little meter, taking care to clean its entire outer surface. "Try it now, Kate. You may be reading light contamination on the meter itself."

It was true. Dusted by "hot" particles, the meter had given spurious readings. Now, repeating her readings several times to make absolutely sure, Kate got three rems at the stairs, a half-rem in the tunnel. But the low basement reading didn't slow our retreat back to the tunnel. Shar kept reminding us that every additional rem was one too many. Up to a point, a human body repaired its riddled tissues—but who among us wanted to find that point?

Through all these morning antics Spot had stayed out of the way, but with all of us milling around on our hurried errands, he began to pace the length of the tunnel. A cheetah is a great one for pacing when he can't cut loose and run.

I busied myself collecting parts for the portable john, which Ern had explained to me in one breath: "Make a seat by cutting a big hole through several thicknesses of heavy cardboard, tape them together over the mouth of a plastic trash box, and make a plastic bag to fit inside."