The Rackham Files (39 page)

Our little convoy stopped about a mile short of the bridge near a welter of abandoned cars, clothing, even bedding and kitchenware. We saw not one human form—only a few rats, seemingly unaffected by fallout. No doubt they lived far down in sewers; theirs was a holocaust lifestyle. Ern judged that the place looked like the aftermath of a railroad staging area but intended to keep going as near as possible to the railroad bridge before abandoning the pickup.

While Cammie and Shar placed Lance into my passenger seat, I borrowed belts from Devon and Ern, passing them through Spot's collar and looping them through tie-downs on the pickup. I didn't want to use my own belt because my pants would've been at half-mast in an instant. That's how much weight I'd lost in nine days.

I said, "Cammie, try and keep him calm, but if he gets out of control, stand away until I'm out of sight. Ern, you start off for the bridge first. Spot might not get antsy if he's the one who's moving instead of me."

Kate, darkly: "And what if he won't follow us over the bridge?"

"Just don't leave him tied up," I sighed. "I can't ask you to waste a second worrying about him." I wasn't prepared for the lingering hug she gave me; I was too intent on leaving. My sister's eyes were wet but steady on me as I slipped into the car.

"I love you, bubba," she said, her chin quivering as she nodded toward her son. "Get him across for me; okay?"

I gave her our old childhood horsewink because I didn't want to cry, then waved her away. I watched my rearview as Ern steered, jouncing, over tracks and headed toward the bridge. Cammie knelt near Spot, scratching him and talking, and though he yipped and watched me with what may have been yearning, he didn't try to break free. I had underestimated his liking for Cammie—or maybe I'd just underrated my quadruped pal.

With a look at Lance, I squirted the Lotus away in search of boat ramps. My nephew drooled bloody spit into a towel, and his normally ruddy color had faded to pallor. I tried to minimize bumps without using the fans; a Cellular's fans are notoriously short-lived if used for more than momentary jumping, and I'd already made one open-water crossing on them.

From Waterfront Road I turned toward the bay at my first chance, resolved to find a ramp westward, to my left. To my right lay the Naval Weapons Station, and new signs warned that I could expect to be shot if I continued in that direction. Would the sentries be adequately protected against radiation? I doubted it. Would they be at their posts? That I did not doubt. But I saw no one in the open. Martinez lay silent and dusty and dead around me.

A mile of fruitless driving took me past warehouses and loading docks, but finally, almost in the shadow of the railroad bridge, I found a small boat ramp. The fans eased us up and shrilled a song of short life as I studied the opposite shore.

The ramp I aimed for was clogged by a deep-keeled sloop which had somehow rolled off its trailer and now lay like a beached whale, mast thrusting into the water. I continued to within a few yards of shore—if the fans packed up now, I could tow Lance to dry land—and scooted toward the little state park where I'd gone skimming with Kate a week, and an era, before. The keening of fans and wail of my little engine masked the distant bang-clatter of Caterpillar diesels high overhead, and I never thought to look up as I skimmed under the high bridges. Until, of course, the Pontiac hurtled into the bay fifty yards in front of me.

The Army Corps of Engineers was as good as its word, using huge log-fork-equipped behemoths to toss everything off the bridge. No, I didn't wallop the damned sedan, but I passed it two seconds after it struck and its splash nearly swamped us. By some miracle my fans digested the spray without complaint and then I could see the park to my right, and three minutes later I plopped the Lotus down on dry land, grateful for the chance to disengage the fans.

I needed the fans again to jump a fence and a jam of cars before finding a route through Benicia's waterfront to the railroad tracks. Then I drove slowly back toward the bridge and shut my engine down a few yards from the tracks. My nephew's breath sounded rattly to me but I didn't know what to do about it. Cradling my twelve-gauge, staring down the tracks, I could barely make out the bobbing of tiny figures nearly a mile away. Nearer, on the freeway bridge, I could see a white-clad man in the enclosed cab of an enormous D-10 bulldozer, maneuvering a semi trailer over the rail with his front blade. He was the first stranger I'd seen who spelled "help" instead of "trouble."

Ern needed a car and I had ten minutes to kill, so I spent it inspecting the dozen vehicles nearby. Three of them still had keys in the ignition but none would run. Someone had drained their tanks, just as I would've done. I pondered transferring a gallon of my fuel to a VW transporter that was surely old enough to vote. Then I squinted toward the bridge again and waved a circled thumb and forefinger. My brother-in-law stumbled as he thrust his bike over the cinders, but filling his cargo basket was a hefty fuel can he'd taken from the pickup. What I'd forgotten, Ern had remembered, and vice versa. Spot heard my hail and briefly proved that he was the world's fastest sprinter.

I hugged the fool, ran toward my struggling little group, grabbed the fuel can from the exhausted Ern, and hoofed it toward that old transporter, cursing Spot as he gamboled beside me. Lucky for us, the old VW had no siphon-proof inlet pipe; the fuel thief hadn't needed to cut its fuel line. I got a gallon of fuel into it before the others arrived panting, Devon far in arrears. Ern got it running while I tossed backpack and shovels from the Lotus.

We were breathless from our labors but: "There'll be message centers in Napa and Yountville," Ern husked, pouring the rest of his fuel into the transporter. His eyes flicked toward Shar, who tenderly eased into the Lotus with Lance. "We'll be in touch."

Cammie urged Spot into the VW as I slid into my car. We wasted no time in farewells, and a moment later I chirped rubber heading north. I patted my sis on the knee after circling one barricade. "We'll get there," I reassured her over the engine's snarl, and saw her nod before I drifted the Lotus through a curve. That was the extent of our conversation en route to Napa; if I was quick enough with the Lotus, maybe we wouldn't lose my nephew.

Life is hard, but death is easy. For bullheaded, valiant little Lance it was as easy as slipping away from us in a game of permanent hookey from the school of hard knocks. He was still with us when the police shunted me to Napa State Hospital, a facility near the town now crammed with thousands of trauma cases and not enough medical staff.

Lance seemed to rally, they said, after a third-year med student drained all that blood from his lung cavity and rigged Shar for a whole-blood transfusion. But Dennison's slug had ruptured too much lung tissue; shocked his system too hard; and we had no thoracic surgeon on call. The hospital had no remaining supply of oxygen or adrenalin and goddammit, the kid never had a chance. . . .

My sis and I wept quietly that afternoon, holding each other as we had when mom died, in a basement hall filled with others whose own miseries insulated them from ours. Eventually I left Shar long enough to send a brief message from the emergency comm center to Napa's message center. I agonized over the content of that message but finally spoke for my allotted twenty seconds. Past the lump in my larynx I said, "They're doing all they can here at Napa State Hospital but it doesn't look good, Ern. Shar is coping." Then I added, "No great hurry; he can't have visitors." That way Ern might prepare himself for what I already knew without his hearing it all at once. And maybe he wouldn't take crazy chances driving to us if he knew he couldn't literally race to Lance's side.

After midnight Ern arrived with Cammie, already suspecting the truth. They let me handle the burial arrangements through a massive graves registration system—one of those horrendous details the Surgeon General's Office had worked out long before as a public health measure.

While waiting in line I learned that the almost negligible radiation in Napa was marginally rising, no thanks to vagrant winds that swept up and borrowed fallout particles from San Rafael. I calculated that we had spent less than two hours between my place and Napa and hoped that the gradual rise in background count would not extend to Yountville. Kate and Devon waited for us there with Spot, working their buns off to get the Gallo house ready for long-term occupation. By "long-term" I was thinking about several weeks. I missed it by a bunch.

I may as well put the bad news first: Devon Baird didn't make it through the winter. Cammie took it hardest, though she, like the rest of us, knew what was coming after his hair fell out and the chelate medicine wasn't available to the public until after his bone marrow had quit producing red corpuscles. It seemed that I wasn't destined to have a foster son after all.

But "destiny," I believe, is a word we use to hide incompetence. I may have a son or daughter one day, because in Kate I've found one hell of a wife.

It hadn't occurred to me that I might ring any chimes for a young woman until early December when I was in Napa, registering the old VW transporter in case its prewar owner showed up. I recognized Dana Martin instantly as she slid the forms to me. She had been an FBI intermediary cutout years before, but sleek and sharp as she was, Dana didn't recognize me at first.

When she did: "Good Lord, Harve," she marveled. "You're a hell of a specimen—and ten years younger, minus the beard and thirty kilos of suet." Same old Dana; even her compliments came with a built-in backhand.

"Living off the land isn't easy even in a mild winter," I reminded her. She seemed interested in prolonging our chance encounter and wondered out loud how often I got into Napa. I said not often, and she constructed an ingenue's pout for me, and I bugged out feeling like an escapee from a small predator—which was more truth than fancy. I kidded myself that I was only in a hurry to barter my three bushels of processed acorns for seed and a plow attachment for our third-hand garden tractor. But on my way back to our place near Yountville, I thought about Dana Martin some more and the comparison with Kate came unbidden, and from that moment forward I was a lapsed bachelor.

I said as much to Kate that evening. She only smiled and said, "I was beginning to wonder about you," and her mouth was warm and hungry. We legalized it in January.

Why a woman of Kate's youth and vitality would want to make such a commitment to me was a mystery until the night she asked me what I knew about the bouillon ballot.

"You might not want to know," I said.

"Which means that you
do.
I thought as much. That lonesome vote for Devon the first time; that was you, wasn't it?"

I cocked an eyebrow, enjoying her quest and the way she went about it. "That would be telling on Ern and Shar."

"Screw the tenants, buster. I'm dead sure it was you. You're not the kind to weasel out of a tough decision—but I wanted to hear it from you."

"All right. It was me; but the way you hollered afterward, the others must've thought it was you."

"I don't care. It wasn't right that three of us placed the burden on one. But I damn sure voted the second time, Harve. Not that it matters, but I bet the second abstention was Ern's."

"You lose."

"Then Shar—"

"Shar, nothing. It was mine."

For once Kate was astonished. "Do you mean to sit here under my fanny and tell me you abstained just to teach us a lesson? That's petty!"

"Not to teach anything," I protested. How the hell did I let myself get into these things? "Kate, after your protest, I saw shame on three faces. I felt sure you would all toughen yourselves on the next ballot—and if you felt tough, chances were you'd vote for tough logic. For Devon. But if all four were the same there'd be no secret to the ballot, and you three were obviously touchy about making your decisions known. So . . ."

"So you gave us something to hide behind." Her head was wagging sideways, but on her face was loving acceptance.

"If you wanted it," I shrugged.

"I want it still. Very few men realize how much a woman will do for a man she can depend on. Long legs and a tight gut are nice, but give me a man I can depend on. Fortunately I can have it all unless you start eating too much again." And then she found my mouth and used it mercilessly, I'm happy to say.

We—not only three surviving McKays and two Rackhams but the surviving eighty million Americans—aren't out of trouble yet, though the armistice is a month old now and the radiation count is slowly receding from a small fraction of a rem in many regions. The chance of bone tumors, leukemia, and other long-term damage has leaped by an order of magnitude, which means we have a small chance of dying that way within the next twenty years. Compared to life expectancy when this republic was young, those odds look bearable. Since the depletion of stored blood, accident victims get whole-blood transfusions or none at all. That's why a blood-group tattoo on the inner forearm is becoming popular. During the past winter there was a shortage of protein, and we see very few cats or dogs these days. Spot is one of those few, because he doesn't solo very far from our designated turf.

You could say with too much justification that Spot is a perfect example of the kind of luxury nobody can afford in this postwar world. If I'd expected the war, perhaps I'd have turned him over to the people at Oregon's Wildlife Safari.

Well, I didn't; and I won't. In the past few months he has learned to maul an intruder and to dodge strangers with sticks that go bang, and he patrols our tender new crops to bag the beasties that would otherwise damage them. That's the only protein supplement he gets, and if he doesn't like living on cereal grains, well, tough; neither do the rest of us. But soybeans will grow here, and by this fall we may not need to boil acorns or find new ways to flavor alfalfa sprouts.

Do I feel defensive about Spot? Yes. Does he pull his weight? Probably not, but maybe so. Gaunt as he is, he submits to the small saddlebags Cammie sewed for him. They'll hold the seine and the fish when we hike to the reservoir, or twenty pounds of whatever else we don't want to tote when one of us goes foraging. Besides, he's becoming known. Anyone who has seen him cover a hundred yards in three seconds will tend to be circumspect at double that distance.