The Rackham Files (34 page)

I pondered that for a moment. "Won't there be some fallout down that stack?"

"Very little in one that narrow, I suspect. Hell, it's just dust. The stove exhaust should drive it up and out anyway. All the same, Harve, remind me to use gloves when I'm rigging the stack."

I said I would. "But damn if I know what you'll use for an exhaust stack; you sure can't use paper, Ern."

"I was snooping around your furnace and water heater before you woke up. The water-heater exhaust and some of your forced-draft pipes are wrapped with fiberglass insulation, and the insulation has a thin aluminum skin that clips around like a sleeve. It's that sleeving I'll use for a stack."

I objected that aluminum wouldn't take the heat either.

He countered with a weird solution: pack raw horsemeat around the lowest part of it, with bread or dough around the meat and a jacket of aluminum foil around the whole mess. The meat would absorb the heat, the bread would absorb the grease, and we could cook twice as much at once. It might, he added with a smile, even be edible.

I said the aluminum sleeves were much too wide.

He said fine, he would narrow them with tin snips and curl the sleeve down to whatever diameter we needed, using wire to hold that diameter.

I said somebody would have to stay with it, taking four rems an hour in the basement.

He said like hell; we could leave the tunnel only to take quick peeks at the stuff we were cooking.

I said if he was so goddamn smart why hadn't he thought of using the aluminum sleeves while we were sweating out the air pump.

He said if he'd been
that
smart, we would've smarted ourselves out of a cookstove because there wouldn't be any aluminum left.

I burst out laughing and took my electric lantern to steal those aluminum sleeves from the house ducting.

Spot was as jumpy as I'd ever seen him, no doubt longing for a sprint around the fence perimeter. Before taking pliers to the aluminum sleeving, I went to my office desk and took the little aspirin tin from the back of the top drawer. The tabs inside weren't aspirin. They were what I called comealongs, not as fast as chloral hydrate but capable of turning a flash-tempered goon into a very mellow fellow. I wasn't sure of their effect on a cheetah, but I could always start with a half-tab and increase the dose if necessary.

It was a rotten trick to pull on my friend. So was keeping him cooped up when he was designed to run. I figured that my problem was common to a million people with dogs too big for house pets. I hoped they were working out better solutions than mine—and I doubted it.

Hustling back to the tunnel, I brought three lengths of aluminum sleeving to Ern. Shar was gently treating Mrs. Baird's blistered skin with baking-soda solution, a task made more onerous by the near-certainty that it would all be futile. The woman's eyes were half-open, her breathing almost imperceptible. She was no longer swallowing much.

I steered my thoughts away from the notion of getting a few of my comealongs dissolved in her water. Had our survival demanded it, I would have done it. Instead, I busied myself slicing strips from a roast taken from my freezer the day before. It was no longer frozen, and one thing we didn't need was tainted meat. I also placed a half-dozen discs of horsemeat, still frozen from Spot's dispenser, atop the candle heater for partial thawing. Spot hovered near, ignoring his farina mix, the furry white tip of his tail signaling the gradual abrasion of his patience.

I showed Ern the half-tab I crumbled into the first thawed hunk of ground meat. "I don't get it," he said.

"Mighty right you don't; he does," I replied and placed the meat before Spot. It was gone in seconds.

Ern paused at his job of making a shallow fuel tray from a cut-down tuna can and twisted wire. "I thought you weren't going to give him . . . whoa. It's not aspirin," he accused.

I told him what it was. "The finicky bastard would never take it in water, I know that. But fool that he is, he trusts me. I intend to keep him half-zonked for the duration, or as long as twenty tabs will last."

Ern nodded, rubbed his temples while squeezing his eyes shut. "Getting a headache—eyestrain, I think. Could the air be going bad on us?"

"I feel clearheaded. I might even tell you what's eleven times twelve, given a calculator and a half-hour start."

"Proof positive," he said with a chuckle and started trimming tabs around the hole he'd made near the flat bottom of the big coffee can. "There's a dozen sure 'nough aspirin in each bike kit, Harve. How about getting me a couple?"

I did, and sniffed out another of Spot's calling cards on the top shelf in the root cellar. Just the thing to shatter an appetite whetted by my rumbling stomach. In any case, Shar had already announced a two-meal day, and if there was one guy alive who could live on his fat for a month, it was yours truly. Well, the more I dieted, the less I'd sweat. Our exhalations had made the tunnel a bit clammy. And that made me think about the moisture in our bodies—which eventually led me to an answer to Shar's unpleasant question about burial.

Ern's little stove became a joke, distinguishable from a comedy of errors only by the fact that no matter how far a comedy goes wrong, it can't kill you. Spot could've been a nuisance when the smell of cooking—yes, and burning—fat began to permeate the tunnel, but the half-tab in his breakfast had made him lackadaisical. Instead of sitting smug and alert like some Egyptian idol, he put his chin on his paws and ignored us. We no longer bothered to seal the door from the basement to the tunnel, since radiation readings were dropping steadily. Besides, we had to run into the basement to adjust the damned stove too often to maintain the seal.

First, the connection between jury-rigged stovepipe and water-heater outlet pipe leaked like a sonofabitch. But Ern's cure was easy: he pulled cottony bits of fiberglass insulation from my air ducts, packed the fluff around the connection, and covered it with kitchen foil lightly bound with wire.

Then the gasoline pan got too hot. We could see fuel boiling just under the flames and hauled the flat pan out to snuff the fire. Then he put dirt into the pan and soaked it with fuel, and covered the little pan with a tuna can through which he punched several holes. That way only a few candlelike flames arose from fumes generated by the heat.

Ern admitted that it was damned dangerous; a nitwit's trick. So was starving or eating raw horsemeat. He finally managed to make the stove work without blowing himself up, but it's not an experiment I recommend.

Under the stove were four inches of dirt we dug from the root cellar, the whole rig sitting in the bottom half of a big turkey baster. Any spattered fuel would soak into the dirt instead of running down onto my carpet. Eventually our noses told us we had managed to include dirt that had soaked up Spot's urine. A male cheetah sprays backward instead of lifting his leg, and some of it had run down the cellar wall into the dirt. Naturally it smelled as though a big cat had peed into a fire. Lovely; just
lovely.
 

Then we had a smoke scare when grease managed to find its way out of the foil surrounding the horsemeat we had packed around the base of the smokestack. Ern said that at least we knew the meat was cooking. Shar replied that any housewife knew we could choke the whole place on grease smoke.

Kate had the real solution: she simply made biscuit dough and packed that around the base of the stack with a foil collar. Worked like a champ; sure, the doughnut-shape biscuit blackened on its inner surface, but who the hell cared by that time?

We found that the stove worked best when it was cooking a potful of stuff on its flat top. Over a period of hours we cooked the sliced roast, twelve pounds of horsemeat, and a big pot of stew simmered with finely diced veggies plus a half-pound of bacon. Kate and Cammie seemed to enjoy the slow assembly-line manufacture of biscuits, which we smeared with fruit preserves. Devon got most of the quince preserves; his diarrhea was less, but still a problem. Shar hoped he could build his own personal plug with quince and half-burned biscuit.

After all the damnfoolishness with that stove, most of us had spent an hour in the basement, which was too long for safety. It was late afternoon then, and the others retreated into the tunnel, where Kate promised to read aloud from a collection of Roald Dahl's fiendish little stories. I had something to do upstairs and didn't want to argue about it, so I announced that I intended to find some soup mix that had been overlooked upstairs. The soup mix and some spices were real enough. Only my motive was faked.

I found the mix and spices at the back of a high kitchen shelf, then ran upstairs to get my raincoat and waders. Back in the kitchen, I put on my regalia and unsealed the door to the screen porch, slipping through with a kitchen knife in one gloved hand.

It took me only a minute to saw the long section of screen from its framing, and I slapped dust from the screen while holding my breath. At first I wondered at the faint, pungent odor, like the stink of a generator with worn brushes. It was ozone, a by-product of gamma rays through the air. Hurriedly I rolled the screen into a tube, but before opening the door into the house again, I paused to gaze outside.

Folded gray quilts of cloud spanned the sky over a gray and green world. It wasn't yet time for my oaks to shed, but their leaves were falling. My grape arbor and quince hedge lay under a light dusting of gray stuff, the color and harbinger of death. No magpie or robin patrolled the weeds, no late-season grasshopper crackled across the open places. No distant automobile moaned down the creek road, no farmer's dog barked, no hawk wheeled beneath the ash-gray clouds. I found it possible, inside my protective clothing, to sweat and raise gooseflesh simultaneously. I had gone to the porch for a makeshift burial shroud, only to find that the world had anticipated me with a shroud of its own.

This time I shucked the coat, gloves, and waders in my dining room with the rolled screen and hurried down to the basement, pausing only to reseal the trapdoor tape. I had not been truly frightened of being alone, or of the dank-smelling dark that fills enclosed basements, for many years; yet I fled to the tunnel. I feared no hobgoblin in the shadows. I felt haunted from within, as though death were trying my body on for size.

At his mother's bidding Lance brought me a cup of strong instant coffee while I rubbed briskly at my arms and chest to banish my internal blizzard. My sis had known me for forty years, so I saw no point in bullshitting her when she softly asked what my trouble was.

I thanked Lance for the coffee; waited until he went back to squat, cross-legged, where he could hear Kate's lively rendition of a story called "Parson's Pleasure." Then I told Shar what I'd done and why.

"I hadn't thought of an elevated burial, but it certainly puts the rest of us at minimum risk," Shar mused. "Didn't the Indians do that?"

"Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne," I said and nodded. "Kept animals away. We can strap—the package—outside an upstairs window on the roof, when the time comes. The south exposure gets a lot of sun, and a shroud of screen will let moisture out. It's my guess that a body could simply mummify before it decays very much, given enough sunlight and hard radiation."

"Mm-hmm. Ironic, isn't it, bubba? They've finally made a weapon that not only kills you but keeps you from spoiling."

"Take it further, sis. In cities where they have a half-million dead and no bulldozers to bury them, disposal squads may carry bodies to the hottest spot they dare to reach."

She meditated on me while I slurped coffee. Then: "I never dreamed this sort of awful work would affect you so, Harve."

"Me neither. But that wasn't what sent the wind whistling up my hemorrhoids. Sis, I stood on my porch a few minutes ago and looked and listened, and there's nothing alive out there. No—thing. You know how the effing mosquitoes love to cruise the back porch? Well, not now they don't. Not a bug, not a sight or sound of anything. I know insects are supposed to be resistant to radiation. Maybe it's the ozone in the air; I don't know."

Ern had moved nearer to listen. He said, "Pretty much as we expected, Harve."

"I know. But we also talked about what we'd do as soon as we left the basement. Peeling and canning vegetables that might be in season; jerking and storing meat; planting as soon as possible." I drained the last bitter taste of coffee, envying the innocence of the youngsters twenty feet away. "But it isn't going to happen that way, folks. Don't you understand?
It's all dead out there now.
"

"Not permanently. Surely not the plants," Shar argued.

"Okay, goddammit; if not dead then lost to us. It only has to be hot enough out there to screw a few rems an hour into you every hour for several more weeks. And that it will damn well do!"

"Are you trying to tell us you think it's hopeless?"

"Here? Yes.
Christ,
I hate to think of leaving, but figure it out yourselves. Shar, what do your notes predict in two weeks, after we're completely out of food and safe water?"

"You know as well as I do. Four rems an hour, something like that."

"And seven times longer—fourteen weeks—for it to decay to a half-rem. Let's say we take an average of two rems during every hour we're outside scrounging food and trying to filter water. That means four hours a day or more; eight rems a day. In seven weeks that's a lethal dose.

"And half that dose will make us as sick as those Japanese fishermen, who got expert medical attention, whereas we won't. With all of us in Devon's condition, we won't be able to fend for ourselves here."

Ern, utterly disgusted: "Why the miserable fuck didn't we think about this a long time ago?"

"Maybe it was unthinkable," I replied, "but who expected such hellacious fallout here? It isn't unthinkable now. What we must do—we
have
to!—is plan where to go and the best time to do it."

"That time is certainly not now," Shar said firmly, "unless we know someplace that's free of contamination and that we can reach within a couple of hours."

We thrashed that out for a while. We knew from the radio that safe spots existed across the bay, below San Francisco. But we entertained no illusions about finding a way to get there in a hurry. Roads to the south were probably not navigable anyway.