The Rackham Files (31 page)

It took thirty minutes to clear two lanes, and while fifty people struggled to clear other lanes, improvising as they went, Ern sprinted to the vanwagon just as Shar got it started. Soon they overtook the guy riding on his rim. Ern estimated it would've taken the man five minutes to change to his spare, which made that press-on-regardless outlook seem pretty shortsighted.

They left the highway at the outskirts of Livermore, a town experiencing its first-ever taste of terminal traffic constipation. Cammie described it wide-eyed: "Worse than Candlestick Park after a game! You'd see a car go shooting down a side street and then it'd come howling back a few blocks further. People were driving across lawns, pounding on doors, getting stuck in flower beds, you name it."

"Like one of those car movies where they do crazy things," Lance put in. "But in the movies they get away with it." Lance had pegged it nicely; too many citizens imagined they could do the stunts they saw on the screen, and too few realized how much those stunts depended on expertise and hidden preparations.

Once they were across town and headed north toward my place, said Shar, she thought they'd pulled it off. They drove slowly, with frequent horn-toots to warn hikers and bikers who streamed out of Livermore along with many cars. There was some traffic into the town as well, coming down from the hills.

Shortly after the road began its twisting course toward Mount Diablo they saw the other van, a battered relic, its driver approaching with no thought for other traffic but the steady blare of its horn. Ern braked hard. "I didn't think they'd make the turn at the rate they were coming," he said.

They did, but only by taking all the road and forcing a hiker to leap for his life. They didn't make it past Ern, though, sideswiping his left front fender with an impact that threw both vehicles into opposite ditches.

Since all four McKays were harnessed, they sustained nothing worse than the bruise along Ern's muscular forearm. Shar quieted Lance's wails ("I wasn't really scared," he insisted.) and after ascertaining that they weren't injured, Ern found that his door would no longer open. He went out the back of the vanwagon, both kids piling out with him, and then hugged them close in protective reflex. Approaching from the other van was a bruiser in his forties, a semiauto carbine in his hands and murder in his face. Behind him, a younger man limped forward hefting a big crescent wrench.

"Damn fool, didn't you hear me honk? That thing of yours better be drivable," snarled the big one, using his carbine as a deliberate menace.

Ern realized he was being hijacked. "Don't point it at the kids," he pleaded, wondering if either vehicle could be driven. "I'll just get the bikes and—"

"Touch that stuff and you're a dead man," said the bruiser, spying a ten-speed bike in the gloom. "Jimmy, we lucked out."

Jimmy, the younger man, brandished the wrench at Ern, who moved back and started to call a warning to Shar. He never got the chance and in any case he would've been warning the wrong person.

The big man with the carbine stepped up to the vanwagon's open doors and was met in midstride by a thunderous blast. Shar had found the antique fowling piece. The tremendous spread of shot took out a bike spoke, knocked a bedroll out of the cargo area, and snatched the carbine from the man, who cartwheeled end for end. Everyone reeled away from the godawful roar and the smoke that followed like a bomb burst from inside the vanwagon.

Ern looked wildly for something to throw at Jimmy the wrench man but found the wrench available. Yowling, hands in air, young Jimmy raced back to his damaged van and tumbled inside. Shar emerged from the vanwagon coughing and spitting, the little blunderbuss empty but still in her hands.

The big man came to his knees, stared at his arms through torn shirt sleeves. Ern was near enough to see the bluish welts on his hands; raised knots like some disfiguring disease that began to ooze blood as both watched in silent fascination. Then the big fellow saw my sis march into view; saw her cock the harmless thing as if to fire again. He stumbled to his feet then and ran doubled over, holding his arms across his body and crooning with pain. Ern ran a few paces after him until he saw that the man had no intention of retrieving his weapon. Obviously the old van was drivable, because in seconds the ex-rough type was spewing gravel in it.

The vanwagon was another matter. Its radiator torn loose, steering rod hopelessly bent, it could not be navigated another hundred feet, much less the twenty miles to my place. Ern managed to start it and got it far off the macadam while water poured from ruptured hoses. The McKays then traded relieved kisses all around and started rigging for their second-stage flight. It was then half past two in the afternoon.

That was about the same time, said Kate Gallo, that she first noticed the burly black-haired gonzo at the racetrack. I let her tell it, making me the heavy in her waggish way. She explained she'd been running from a check-kiting spree and I said nothing to contradict her. But when she tried to describe our open-water crossing as literally floating across, I started to hum "It Ain't Necessarily So" and got my laugh before moving over to help Ern.

He was wiring all three tiny bike generators together, positive to positive and negative to negative. That was when I admitted that Ern McKay had truly found a way to
recharge my damn battery!
The output of a single generator was too puny to feed a whopping big car battery, but three generators in parallel? Still a trickle-charge, but a significant trickle.

I thought it might be hard work to pedal with three generators riding against a bike wheel but I was wrong. Ern insisted that we connect the generator's positive terminal to that of the battery only while someone was pedaling. If that circuit was intact while no one pedaled, he said, the battery's energy might trickle
out
through those generators. As it was, we could recharge the battery with about four hours of pedaling and have twelve hours of light without draining the battery at all. I could've kissed him for that. Kate did it for me, squarely on his forehead.

At length Kate reached the point in her tale where I "abandoned" her to search for my family, and I filled them in with a brief account of my trip along the mountain ridge. "If you had any illusions about the flatlanders around the bay pulling through this," I concluded, "forget 'em. The burn cases in Oakland alone would overload burn-unit facilities from coast to coast."

With a glance toward the comatose Mrs. Baird, Shar muttered, "You might try for a bit of optimism."

"I
am
optimistic, sis. I'm assuming a lot of burn victims will survive the firestorm and fallout long enough to profit from medical treatment. If you've read about the quake and fire in San Francisco back in 1906, you'll recall it was the fire that caused the most casualties. Volunteer crews came from as far as Fresno to help. Trainloads of food and volunteers in, trainloads of refugees out.

"It's not as though there were no precedent for this," I went on, mostly for the benefit of our younger members. "Europeans saw great cities destroyed, whole populations decimated or worse, forty years ago. London, Dresden, Berlin—and don't forget how Japan was plastered. I know it wasn't on such a scale as this, but they did find ways to rebuild."

"It took 'em years," Ern reminded me. "And they had American help."

I nodded. "You're mighty right there, pal. And that's all we can expect, too: American help."

Kate asked in disbelief, "From where? Fresno?"

"No, from us! And millions more like us. Damnit, think! There must be two hundred thousand people schlepping around in Santa Rosa right now, and if the fallout missed 'em they'll probably be outside in shirt sleeves."

"Sure—grubbing for roots," said Cammie. "And I've heard mom talk about the radiation that's spread all over the world now."

"Can't deny that," I said. "We'll probably have higher infant mortality and ten times the cancer we've had in the past. I grant you all that, much as I loathe it. But don't tell me we lack the guts people had in Stalingrad and Texas City and Nagasaki!"

"I wanted to be a golf pro," said young Devon softly. "Looks like I'll be a carpenter or a bricklayer."

Ern: "Could be. Or a cancer researcher. Harve's not promising fun and games, Devon; only hope. We'll all have to bust our butts for a few years, and we have no assurance that we'll ever see things back to normal. Whatever that is," he said and chuckled. "It doesn't take a professor of sociology to predict a sudden change in the American way of life. On the other hand, it might not be so noticeable to farmers in Oregon or a dentist in Napa."

"Oh God," Kate breathed almost inaudibly and quit cycling the air pump.

Cammie asked for us all: "Trouble with the pump?"

Kate took a long shuddering breath, shook her head, began to pump again. "My father has a summer home near Napa. Little acreage just outside of Yountville, which nobody ever heard of. Just a statusy thing. They rarely go there."

"Maybe they're there now," I offered.

Another headshake. "Not them; that's what hurts. You don't know my father. All his clout is in connections with people in the city." No matter where you lived around the bay, when you said "the city" you meant metropolitan San Francisco. "It's just about the only place where he doesn't carry a gun. No, my family will play out their hand right smack in the city."

Of course I'd told them what the Santa Rosa broadcast had said. We knew the approaching fallout was coming from San Francisco itself. Most hands being played out in Baghdad-by-the-Bay were losing hands. It was one thing to reject your family's ways but quite another to envision them all dead in a miles-wide funeral pyre.

"Maybe your folks had a cellar," Cammie said.

Kate brightened. "Wine cellar. Part of the mystique."

"You don't mean
those
Gallos," Lance said in awe.

"No"—Kate managed a wan smile—"but I could lie about it if you insist."

Ern said he didn't care which Gallo she was if she could produce a bottle of sherry, and that reminded me of the stuff in my liquor cabinet. I said to Shar, "We need to take another reading in the basement for that graph you're making. I'll just nip out and do it and bring back a bottle to celebrate our new electric light plant."

It was around four in the afternoon. Shar consulted her graph and calculated that the outside reading should be around a hundred rems, while the basement should read about two or three—if the fallout cloud had missed us. Five minutes in the basement would be a twelfth of that dosage, which laid only a small fraction of a rem on the meter reader. "It's your hide, bubba," said my sis.

I took the meter hardware and fed several sparks to the meter, then chose a half-empty bottle of brandy and some cream sherry the kids could sip with us. I rummaged and found two decks of cards.

The basement stank like an outhouse. We needed the forty gallons of water in the tunnel for drinking, but my waterbed was available so I sloshed some water from the mattress into a pan and filled the toilet tank in three trips. The damned thing had to be flushed of its barf and never-you-mind.

Then, after nearly four minutes, I checked the meter.

The leaves of foil were completely relaxed together.

Fighting jitters, I charged the meter again and took a one-minute reading. Meanwhile I cursed myself for assuming that the reading wouldn't be off scale in four minutes. I got a one-minute reading of over four rems an hour and hightailed it into the tunnel.

Though abashed by my stupid error, I described it to the others, determined that they could profit by my dumbfuckery. Shar's conclusion was simple and direct; the only smart way to read the meter was to watch it closely for the first minute. If you didn't have a useful reading by that time, ambient radiation was roughly one rem or less.

Her second conclusion was borne out as we took readings in the tunnel. Shortly before I'd gone out to the basement, heavy fallout had begun to irradiate my little place.

For the next hour the tunnel was a hotbed of projects. I was urged to do nothing that even smacked of exercise because my great bulk would use up twice as much air as, say, Lance—and I'd give off more cee-oh-two and water vapor. So I sat near the little six-watt bike headlamp and took several long readings on the meter.

Shar turned over the sponge-bath chore to Devon and went to use our temporary john. She sprinkled a shotglassful of bleach into the hole after using it, carefully extracted the half-full bag, and placed it into a big brown paper grocery bag. The taped seams of the plastic bag might give way, but it wouldn't come apart with heavy kraft paper around it. She installed the next plastic bag with the paper sack already surrounding it in the plastic trashcan, and I wondered why Ern hadn't thought of that. It is truly amazing how fast we get smart when faced with a dribble of dookey.

Especially somebody else's.

I also understood how farm and ranch people earn their penchant for earthy humor. Dealing with natural functions like evacuation on such a grand scale, you're often faced with side effects that could outrage a saint. But you can always joke about them, robbing them of their power to beat you down. Maybe that explains the rough jokes we shared while in the tunnel.

Ern read my sister's notes and found little to criticize. At a quarter till five we were reading almost exactly two rems per hour in the tunnel, which scared the hell out of us until we found it subsiding soon afterward. We didn't talk about it to the kids, who were fixing a simulacrum of supper and pedaling the bike.

By six o'clock Shar had a radiation-versus-time graph and an estimate of the total dosage for each of us. For Mrs. Baird, who continued her heaves and diarrhea without losing much fluid, Shar simply put a question mark. I knew the answer in total rems had to be in four figures.

Next to Devon Baird's name she wrote four hundred, with another question mark after it. He seemed to be perking up, even insisting on pedaling the bike and pumping air. Best of all, he was retaining food and liquids now. His question mark was the only valid one, but who was so cruel as to tell him that?