Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) (13 page)

“Dr. Clapper warned us,” Mom chimed
in.
 
“He said
,
if we didn’t build our border defenses—”

“Damn it, Abby!”
 
Dad raked his fingers through his hair.
 
“This is real; this is for keeps!
 
Can’t you get that through your head?”

Mom and Dad always tore into each other
when Willie Clapper’s name came up.
 
I
was trying to think of a way to sidetrack the argument, when we heard the dull
thunder of an explosion somewhere behind us.
 

Mom screamed.
 
There were more explosions.
 
Flashes of light, like heat lightning,
flickered on the western horizon.
 

We were close to San Bernardino by that
time.
 
Both sides of the highway were
crowded with cars, but we were moving at a good speed.
 
The planes came suddenly, slashing out of the
night sky.
 

Bullets splattered the cars.
 
Somewhere ahead of us a gas tank
exploded.
 
I heard the terrified screams
and the grinding of metal upon metal, as automobiles piled up on the road.
 
The planes came again.
 
Holes appeared in a diagonal line across our
windshield.
 
Mom cried out and covered
her eyes.
 
Dad slumped on the seat beside
her.
 

I twisted the wheel desperately to miss
the wreckage.
 
The car banged through the
guardrail into a ditch.
 
It lurched
sickeningly, and righted itself again.
 
Dad slid off the seat.
 

The rear wheels spun in the mud, caught
suddenly, and hurled the car into an orange grove beside the highway.
 
I jammed down the brake as the front bumper
came up against a tree trunk.
 
My head
snapped against the broken windshield.
 
I
blacked out.

III. The
City—Thursday, 9:25 P.M.
 
Dr. Stewart
Roswell

I STOPPED a stranger as he left the
hotel; he said the Civil Defense Organization had ordered the evacuation of
Los Angeles.
 
For years they had told us
not to jam the highways during an emergency.
 
This last minute change seemed pure hysteria, not good sense.
 

“Are you leaving, Dr. Roswell?” Maria
D’Orlez asked.
 

“My dear child, I’m nearly sixty; at my
age, a man doesn’t start running for his life.”
 

“You aren’t afraid of the bomb?”

“I’ve learned to live with it.”
 

“And the Russians:
 
are you afraid of them?”

She asked the question seriously, her
dark eyes large and intent.
 
I tried to
give her an honest, rational answer.
 
“The Russian people are like other human beings; like
ourselves
.
 
The tragedy
of our time is that we were never able to find a basis for mutual understanding.
 
The iron wall that separates us—”

“You wrote in one of your books, ‘The
common man in the Soviet world is no more aggressive, no more warlike, than the
average American.’
 
Do you still believe
that, Dr. Roswell?”

It surprised me that she had the wording
so accurately.
 
“I was writing about the
general traits common to all people,” I explained, “not a form of
government.
 
Keep that in mind,
Maria.”
 

“Oh, I wasn’t being critical!”
 
Her eyes were wide with innocence.
 
“I agree with you completely.”
 

I looked at her sharply.
 
I had a feeling she was mocking me.
 
She slipped her hand into mine.
 
“Will you drive me home, Dr. Roswell?”

When we got into my car, Maria moved very
close to me.
 
“I don’t want to go home
yet.
 
I want to see what other people are
doing.”
 

“But your parents, Maria—”

She smiled mysteriously.
 
“They’ll understand.”
 

We drove through residential streets,
where families were packing clothing and food into cars.
 
I was surprised at the general orderliness
of the evacuation, the absence of panic.
 
You might have thought the people were all going on a mass picnic.
 
They were cheerful, as if the whole thing
was a lark; they called jokes back and forth; they were helping each
other.
 

Maria D’Orlez seemed disturbed
;
certainly not pleased.
 
A dark shadow of anger crossed her face.
 

“I’d better take you home now,” I said
when we returned to the car.
 

“Not yet.”
 
She glanced at a clock on a public building;
the hands stood at eight-ten.
 
“Let’s go
up on the hill, Dr. Roswell, and look down at the city—one more look at the
bright lights before they’re gone.”
 

It was after nine when I parked at the
viewpoint on the crest of the hill.
 
The
night was unusually clear.
 
The lighted
city streets spread out below us in a geometric checkerboard.
 
We could see the endless columns of
headlights moving away from the city on the freeways—like an army of marching
fireflies.
 

“Americans are gilt-edged fools,” Maria
said suddenly.
 
“They’ll lose this war,
but there was a time once when they could have wiped out the Reds—when they had
weapons the Russians couldn’t match.”
 

“Not fools, Maria; humanitarians.
 
We put our faith in justice instead of brute
force.”
 

“Force is justice, Dr. Roswell.
 
To win:
 
that’s the only thing that counts.”
 

“And you believe they will?”

“The Communists have planned this for a
long time; they’ve calculated all the risks.
 
Tonight the strength is on their side, and they won’t be afraid to use
it.”
 

“Only material power,
Maria.
There’s something else—”

She laughed.
 

A blast of fire and flame shot up from
the entrance through the harbor breakwater, followed rapidly by a dozen more
explosions.
 
Something—enemy
submarines?—had triggered the mines protecting the harbor.
 
Cold fear rose in my throat.
 
Maria looked at her watch, and flung her arms
around my neck.
 

“I’m frightened—terribly frightened,”
she whispered.
 
I felt her lips warm on
mine, her fingers tearing, like cat claws, at the back of my skull.
 

There were more explosions in the
harbor.
 
Debris fountained up from the
navy installations.
 
Enemy submarines
were there; that much was clear.
 
A
suicide squad had come first, exploding the mines; the rest were pouring
through the gap.
 

I tried to pull Maria’s hands away from
my neck.
 
I felt the pinprick of the
needle and I heard her say,

“We still have a use for you intellectuals,
Dr. Roswell—for a while yet.”
 

I wanted to push her from me.
 
I wanted to fling myself out of the car.
 
But my body went limp and a black nightmare
closed over my mind.
 
The last thing I
saw was the Madonna smile on Maria’s face, lit by the scarlet fire of the explosions
in the harbor.

IV
.
 
The
Highway—Thursday 11:00 P.M.
 
Jerry
Bonhill

“JERRY!
 
JERRY, your father’s dead!”
 
The
shrill scream came from far away.
 
I felt
cold hands pulling at my shirt, dragging me back from the emptiness.
 
Pain throbbed in my head.
 
I opened my eyes.

I couldn’t have been out for more than a
minute.
 
The planes were still diving at
the highway, slashing bullets into the shambles.
 
All the traffic had stopped, held up by the
wreckage.

People were running from their cars and
leaping into the ditch.
 
A poor concealment,
for the gasoline left no sheltering darkness.
 
The planes came again, firing into the ditch.
 
I could hear the cries of the dying and the
wounded, above the jet-blast of the motors.
 

Mom helped me out of the car.
 
With her handkerchief she dabbed at the cut
on my forehead, where my head had struck the windshield.
 
When I heard the swelling roar of the planes
a third time, I jerked Mom down on the earth.
 
We rolled beneath the car.
 
A
bullet hit one of the windows and the fragmented glass clattered against the
open door.
 

In five minutes it was
over:
 
that first
taste of hell.
 
Flights of planes came
out of the east, with wing-mounted guns blasting at the enemy.
 
The air battle joined high above us.
 
We heard the angry clatter of machine guns
and the roar of motors.
 
Sometimes a
plane fell, making a comet-trail of fire in the night sky.
 

Men were hauling the wreckage off the
highway.
 
I joined them.
 
In ten minutes we had one lane clear.
 
The refugee cars began to move again.

We were still clearing the highway when
the Red Cross helicopters came, settling into the field beyond the grove.
 
Army Medical Corpsmen lifted the seriously
wounded into stretchers and loaded them in the waiting ships.
 
One of the pilots told me the unit came from
March Field.
 
He gestured toward the air
battle thundering overhead.

“They’re our boys up there, what’s left
of them.
 
They must have tangled with the
whole, damn Red air force.”
 

“What’s happening?” I asked.
 

“This is one of the neatest sneak
attacks on record.”
 
He fumbled in his
jacket pocket for a cigarette.
 
“First
they fouled up the roads so we can’t get any transports to go through, and
then—”

“You mean the evacuation of L.A.?
 
It was on the radio.
 
I heard it myself.”
 

 
“Half a dozen sympathizers, could hold a
station long enough to make the announcement.
 
Afterward they wrecked every transmitter in the city, so the C.D.
couldn’t broadcast a correction.
 
That’s
the way we have it doped out.”
 

“But the Russian planes—”

“A couple of hours after the highways
were nicely jammed, Red subs broke through into the Los Angeles harbor.
 
We don’t know how many—none of our boys have
got close enough to see—but it’s a damn big chunk of their fleet.
 
The subs launched the fighter planes, and
they’re probably putting men ashore by this time.
 
They’ve bought themselves a beachhead, unless
we can move transports down these roads mighty quick.”
 

“Don’t we have any bases closer to the
city?”

“The Soviets have given us the
works—everything in one knockout attack.
 
Most of our fighter planes were shuttled north to intercept the big
bombers.
 
This L.A. landing has us where
the hair is short.
 
All we have at March
Field are the cadets, still in flight school.”
 

“And the navy?”
I asked.
 

“Most of the Pacific Fleet is at
Hawaii—that is, the ships the Red subs haven’t sunk.
 
The Reds will probably hold their beachhead
for a while.
 
But if they want to exploit
it, they’re going to need a hell of a lot of manpower.
 
How will they get it here?
 
Tonight they’re throwing away their air force
and a big piece of their submarine fleet.
 
And don’t forget:
 
no Soviet city
is going to survive our H-bombs.
 
We
aren’t licked yet, kid; not by a long shot.”