“Why are
you
going?” Carlucci demanded. “And how?”
She smiled at him, focusing her warm Miss Used to Do Beauty Contests Beam into his eyes. “Well, I had enough trouble with the old tyrant when I was just his daughter; I’m not sticking around to find out what it’s like to be his heir and vassal. And somebody’s gotta sail the boat.”
THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON, DC. ABOUT 2:00 A.M. EST. SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 2.
Despite what the rest of the country knows in its bones,
some
of the people in Washington are responsible sorts who are capable of forethought; they began to leave when the electricity stopped coming back up, while some cars and trucks were still running. Their disappearance made things inconvenient and difficult for the less foresighted, who, seeing things deteriorate quickly, left soon after, making things still worse for the remaining people with even shorter time horizons.
Around midnight, a tipping point was passed. National leaders and government personnel had withdrawn into safe places like the DRET compound at St. Elizabeth’s. Ordinary citizens had fled, if possible, knowing what was coming.
At two A.M. the people left were the completely immobile, the stupid, the stubborn, and people without foresight or impulse control.
Crowds in the street were hungry and looking for excitement. The remaining inventories of booze and bling in stores and warehouses were unguarded. Nearly all police had deserted; hardly any of the unlucky people left in ordinary residences were capable of defending them. Some of the boldest and most impetuous of the street crowds broke shop windows; no one stopped them from carrying off liquor and jewelry (white crusts and foul odors around the electronics kept them mostly untouched). Bartenders and bouncers died; doors and windows broke; the cornered innocent died with nowhere to run; recalcitrant defenders burned in their refuges; and authority did not show up.
When the remaining population in the streets fully understood this, like a hot room flashing over when a window breaks, like an auction stampede when the last lot is up, destruction and violence spread through the city.
Washington was still the capital. Federal law-enforcement people and military units moved in and backed up the few surviving city forces; units of the Maryland and Virginia Guard joined them, and not long after dawn, the rioters had been swept into a few large holding areas, fire lanes cleared to isolate the big fires, and a sort of order restored, especially in the area close to the National Mall.
Tens of thousands of bodies lay in the wreckage, or unburied in the streets. Some blocks burned for days, unattended. Countless old people, children, bedridden patients, people whose powered wheelchairs had stopped running, and the few brave people who would not desert them, died buried in rubble, smothered in smoke, or roasted alive. Great scars of tumbled buildings, toppled poles and posts, and broken concrete slashed deep into the heart of the great city. And in a few large auditoriums, stadiums, and office buildings, tens of thousands of people who had formed the mob, or fled one mob and been caught up in another, or just gone out to see what was happening, were held there by the guns of the guards, waiting in hunger and despair for whatever might come. The horror was: nothing did.
Midmorning of the next day, when he was briefed on the situation, Peter Shaunsen, Acting President of the United States, asked three questions: Was anyone interested in being on the rebuilding commission? Could some of the fire lanes be cleared and paved into boulevards or malls to beautify the city? And what was being done to ensure that everyone who was not dead was able to vote?
A Secret Service man who was at the meeting skipped his next shift to walk over to see Chris Manckiewicz at the
Washington Advertiser-Gazette
. He expected to be fired when he returned, but no one even asked about his absence, so he just picked up his gear and went to his post.
SIXTEEN HOURS LATER. OFF THE CALIFORNIA COAST. ABOUT TWENTY MILES WEST OF THE MOUTH OF THE RUSSIAN RIVER. 2:30 P.M. PST. SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 2.
Ysabel was “not what you could call a natural sailor,” Bambi said, not for the first time, to Mensche. The Pacific is choppy in the fall, but nonetheless, most people got some kind of sea legs after a day on the sea.
Bambi had adjusted to the constant retching noises from the girl hanging over the railing. As they had worked their way north, the waves got a little bigger, heralding a storm forming far up toward Alaska, but the prisoner seemed no worse, or at least she had no more to expel.
“At least she’s not a flight risk right now,” Larry Mensche pointed out. He
had
turned out to be a natural sailor; she’d taught him to hold a course by the compass, allowing her to get long naps all along the way, so that she was in much better shape than she had expected to be.
“I can see why people like this,” he observed. “But I’m guessing this is perfect weather, right?”
“About as perfect as it gets in the fall, yeah.”
A strange urking noise from the rail made Mensche scuttle forward and slap Ysabel’s back a couple of times, clearing something that hadn’t quite come out right, then wipe her face with a damp cloth, surprisingly gently. When he returned, Bambi said, “Considering how much of a pain in the ass to the whole world she’s been, you’re pretty nice to her.”
“She looks a lot like Debbie,” Mensche said. “So . . . even if it doesn’t make any sense—”
“Naw, it makes all the sense in the world.” Bambi squeezed his arm, and he nodded, appreciating the support.
One more point for the man, he can tell the difference between the pretty chick being his buddy and copping a feel.
“Hey, chances are that if your daughter needs the help, someone’s taking care of her. Remember that’s half the stories on KP-1—people looking after each other, communities banding together to make it through, all that. She’s probably swinging a shovel on a road crew and getting one big bowl of soup a day, but she’s got somewhere warm to sleep and she’s safe, bet you anything.” It sounded lame to Bambi even as she spoke it; she had to think,
If the guards just locked them down and walked away, how long before—
“Yeah,” Mensche said, “but I can’t help worrying. Anyway, so how’d this guy end up with a name like ‘Quattro,’ and how’d your dad decide he was the man for you?”
She shrugged. “Our parents knew each other, very well, actually. When I was a lonely teenage girl, and he was a miserably lonely geek of an engineering student, we corresponded all the time, inventing codes to keep the old man baffled. It was years before I realized how much I’d
encouraged
the old bastard, since he thought Quattro and me must be hiding our love affair. Quattro was my lifeline; I needed someone to agree with me when I said that all the kids in my high school were stupid and worthless and superficial, especially because I was pretty and popular and a brat and a half, so I didn’t have the loser support network that so many alienated kids do. Dad’s plan for me to fall in love with the dashing older man and unite two Castles and two Castle-movement families, however, foundered on the fact that I’d sooner have married one of my pet llamas at the time.
“Quattro’s not attractive? Nice guy but no spark?”
“Nowadays he’s a damn handsome Howard Hughes type, he’s only seven years older than I am, and I occasionally think about seeing whether any sparks might happen. But back then, give me a break, he was
old
, not to mention a weird geek, despite being my best friend ever—which wasn’t hard back in those days, all you had to do was
like
having me for a friend. Hardly anyone else did.
“Anyway, so about his name. Quattro’s parents were chronic jokers. They noticed that a lot of dumbasses didn’t know that Mercedes was a girl’s name and that the car was named after a major investor’s daughter. That particular ignorance led, later on, to people naming their kids P-o-r-s-c-h-e instead of P-o-r-t-i-a, and even lamer baby names like Lexus and Avante, because the same dumbasses thought it was all classy and shit to name their daughter after an expensive car.
“So apparently the Larsens, being even more eccentric than my father, and maybe slightly richer, decided to sarcastically name their children after cars, figuring that all the friends they wanted to keep would get the irony. Hence Quattro. He says it was a compromise between Prius and Thunderbird.
“Anyway, Quattro was raised as one of those heroin-in-vending-machines libertarians, and they gave him his own Castle for his twenty-first birthday. I guess a Ferrari would have been too humdrum. So now he has a fortress outside Jenner that’s damned near as elaborate as Dad’s. You’ll like him, he’s pretty much post-political, good heart, nice guy . . . hunh. I
might
have to check the spark thing.”
“I really appreciate your taking me along—I know you didn’t have much choice, but I guess I’m glad it’s me. I don’t think the Federal government will last much longer.”
“Dad would agree with you.”
“Yeah, but he’s working on it, I’m just assessing. Anyway, if they dismiss me . . . well. Just a few hundred miles to walk to Coffee Creek and see what happened to Deb, or if I can’t find out there, maybe I can walk over to Reno and see if my ex knows anything. Something to do, you know?”
As they sailed on, clouds gathered to the north, and the sea rose a little every hour. Late that afternoon, the sea breeze started to blow inland. She headed the boat in toward the coast. “How exactly will you find where we’re going?” Mensche asked. “Without GPS I mean? I’m assuming that weird telescope and the windup clock have something to do with it.”
“I don’t really need to know longitude, because we’ve been sticking close to the coast. Latitude is a piece of cake with an accurate clock—like the chronometer from Dad’s collection, here—and this little gadget that you call the weird telescope is used to measure the angle between the sun and the horizon, or where the horizon would be if the water would hold still—that’s what the level on the side here is for. So I’m sailing along a line about five seconds of latitude south of the mouth of the Russian River. That should bring me in someplace along the state beach; once I spot land, I just sail north till I see the mouth of the Russian, and in we go—Quattro’s Castle is just west of Jenner, on the river, so it’ll be the first Castle on our left.”
“It’s weird how fast people got used to ‘Castles’ in America.”
“The Castle movement didn’t start till some of the fringier rich people freaked out that Obama was president, so yeah, it’s less than twenty years. Though really the house I grew up in, before Dad built the big one above the Harbor, was a Castle in all but name. Some rich guys have always built fortified big houses in isolated spots; Dad’s is only noticeable because he decided to build it so close to a big city.”
The weather held, and they enjoyed the last of the sandwiches and apples before they saw the coast, savoring the warmth of the sun and the crispness of the air. The late-fall-afternoon sun was still painting the coast in rich golds and deep blues as they turned north; it was not quite sunset on the river when Mensche said, “So, I guess this is where I say, ‘Castle, ho!’?”
“Not advisable to call me a ho, but otherwise, yeah.”
The man who met them at the pier looked like he was trying to dress as something between the Crocodile Hunter and the Veteran Surfer: khaki safari shirt, baggy knee-length shorts with too many pockets, old-style leather boots. He wore an immense hogleg of a revolver on one hip and a huge belt knife on the other. The effect was somewhat spoiled by his camo strap cap held together with a piece of shoelace where the plastic strap had been, and by a straggly brown-and-gray ponytail that would have been more in keeping with an old-school software developer or a trustafarian venture capitalist.
“Right when I thought you’d be,” Quattro said, smiling. “How was the trip, Bambi?”
“Not too different from the usual except for having to dust off a tiny bit of my celestial navigation skills. This is Special Agent Larry Mensche; and this is Quattro Larsen. And this is our prisoner, Ysabel Roth.”
“Kind of a harsh introduction, isn’t it? Young lady, can we parole you while you’re on the grounds here? Will you give your word and keep it that you won’t run away?”
Ysabel gasped, “Promise me that the world will stop bucking and rolling, and I’ll do whatever you say.”
As they walked up the pathway to the big house, Bambi noted dugouts, trenches, and walls to cover troops moving out from the house; two garden sheds that would make good blockhouses; and a wide-walled patio with a loopholed wall that would allow small artillery to cover the mouth of the Russian River. “You’re a lot less public about your Castle than Dad is about his.”
“Remember the silly commercials when we were kids? He’s a PC, I’m a Mac. His fortress looks like a fortress and it’s all built around its fortress-ness. My fortress just works.”
Larry stopped dead and whistled. “Is that your airfield?”
“Yeah. Cool, hey?”
“I
loved
classic planes when I was a kid. Pre-jets, I mean. So, yeah, I built models of several of those. But aren’t they falling apart just like everything else?”
“Parts of them are, and avgas is going to be a problem. But the really old birds are less electrical and less plastic than present-day airplanes, and their engines were built for unreliable cruddy fuel. I’ve had that DC-3’s engines up and running on biodiesel, even long before Daybreak, because I thought regular fuel sources might be cut off. And the only thing electrical in that engine is the ignition, and I think I’ll be able to replace the plastic and rubber with wood, glass, and metal. Back before there was vulcanized rubber, when they needed airtightness, they used different kinds of shellacs and oils on silk and linen, and there was the stuff called goldbeater’s fabric that was basically treated gut. And as of last night, when
Arcadia
made it back here safely, I’ve got a couple materials scientists from Cal Poly, who are very glad to have their families safely out of the chaos, working on what we can make tires out of. I really want it for the planes, but I’m not opposed to the idea that being the re-creator of the pneumatic tire might make me richer than God.”