Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (57 page)

They ambled past a long-dead 76 station. “You ever gas up here before the Change, Eddie?” he asked one of his comrades.

“Couple times, maybe,” Eddie Epstein said. “I hadn't had my license long. How about you?”

“Same deal,” Bruce said. He leaned forward and laid a hand on Sherman's neck. The gelding was named for the old tank. These days, a mounted lancer was the nearest equivalent. “Who woulda figured cars would crap out and horses'd be the real thing?”

“Not me, that's for goddamn sure,” Eddie said. “I didn't give a rat's ass about 'em till the Change, I'll tell you that. We lived in Chatsworth 'cause my mom and my sis were horse people.”

“My dad bred 'em—but he got the dough to buy 'em from his used-car lot,” Bruce said. “Just goes to show you, don't it?”

The other three Lancers rolled their eyes. They were young bucks, born since the Change. Listening to old farts yatter on about bygone days bored the crap out of them. But they had the sense not to show it too much when one of the old farts was the ruler of the west end of the Valley and the second was his right-hand man.

West of the defunct gas station, some fig trees had been planted on ground cleared after the power died. They looked peaked. There wasn't enough water to keep them happy. There was barely enough water to keep the people who took care of them happy. Cisterns, catch basins in the concrete-bottomed L.A. River, using pipes and lining canals with old plastic sheeting wherever possible . . .

In dry years, none of it was quite enough. You got through as best you could. The Lancers and their kin and the warhorses had first call on what there was. The rest of the people took their chances and prayed for rain.

The freeway sat above the usual street level. A watchtower built atop it gave the Lancers a long look to the south. Semaphores—fire signals at night—could relay news north the half-dozen miles to Chatsworth proper in a matter of minutes. As modern as last week, Bruce thought sourly. But with radios and phones and even telegraphs dead as Stalin, it was the best system he'd been able to dream up.

He muttered to himself when he rode under the 101. He'd been starting high school when the Northridge quake rocked the Valley in 'ninety-four. One of these years, a new one would bring down the overpass. If you happened to be below it just then . . . well, at least everything would be over in a hurry, anyhow.

A wagon pulled by a two-horse team came along Ventura Boulevard. Front and rear axles had been taken from a car. The wheels were wooden, with iron tires, and bigger than the old rubber tires would have been. The teamster on the wagon doffed his straw hat—not quite a sombrero, but close—to the Lancers.

Gravely, Bruce returned the salute. He demanded respect from his subjects. But you had to show you deserved it. He'd learned that playing Pop Warner football a million years ago. A coach who was an asshole might get the outward trappings of respect, but people would tell jokes about him behind his back. Bruce didn't want that happening to him. So when he got, he gave, too.

A couple of blocks south of Ventura lay what had been a shop that sold cameras and telescopes and binoculars. Some of its products extended the range of the signal towers. What had been the parking lot next to it was a field now. Opium poppies, redder and darker than their native cousins—which had been the state flower when California was a state—nodded in the breeze. Pre-Change painkillers were hard to come by these days, and of uncertain worth. You fought pain any way you could; it was everybody's enemy.

The land to either side of the road rose as you got deeper into the canyon. The Valley's street grid disappeared; the little streets that branched off from Topanga Canyon Boulevard wandered every which way. The land got greener as the Valley floor gave way to the Santa Monica Mountains—not green, but greener.

Then the ground dropped away from the west of the main road, down a slope that had made many a drunk driver in the old days go
Oops!
or
Shit!
just before he hit bottom. Even on horseback—hell, even on foot—getting down there or back up again was a bastard and a half. No wonder the Topangans chose that Glenview stretch to hold as their frontier.

Well before he got there, Bruce held up a hand and reined in. The Lancers with him also stopped. The Topangans had a watchtower there. Somebody with binoculars or a spotting scope would be keeping an eye on them right now. The road was open—trade mattered to Chatsworth as well as to the hippies down the canyon. But the Topangans could close it in a matter of minutes, and have the closed stretch as strong as the rest of their works inside of an hour.

“So what you got in mind, boss?” Eddie asked. He figured Bruce had to have something on the fire.

“We can't go through 'em. It'd cost us too much. We've got to find some way to slide around 'em.”

Bruce had less in the way of a scheme than he wished he did. But he knew he was right about that. He had more people to draw on than the Topangans, but they would enjoy the defenders' advantage. They had catapults by their walls, too. They wouldn't just throw man-squashing boulders. They'd throw big pots full of pre-Change oil and gasoline: homemade napalm. If that stuff clung to you, you begged somebody to cut your throat. And you thanked him with your dying breath when he did it for you.

“Go down Old Topanga?” one of the younger Lancers suggested.

“We've tried it before, Garth,” Bruce said. “It wouldn't be a surprise even if we hadn't. They're ready for it—and they hold the high ground.”

“You wouldn't have come all this way if you were just gonna do the peaceful coexistence thing,” Garth Hoskins said.

All this way. They'd ridden maybe eight miles, and they'd ride back before the end of the day. With the horses walking, an hour and a half or so in each direction. Probably two hours on the way home—take it easy on the beasts in the heat of the afternoon. By modern standards, it was a long way. No hopping in the car now. Too bad.

But Garth wasn't wrong. He was only about five-seven, but he was built like a brick. When he wasn't practicing with sword and lance and ax and mace, he was pumping iron. He got off on exercise the way stoners got off on pot. He wasn't stupid, either. Not subtle, maybe, but not stupid.

He sure did have the post-Change view of distance, though. In Bruce, it still warred with what he'd known as a kid. He'd flown in an airliner. He'd seen the ground from six miles up. Garth never had. He never would.

“We've got to have the right approach,” Bruce said. He might have been channeling his old man. Nacho Delgado had got rich unloading clunkers on suckers with bad credit. His son cared little about money. Power was a much headier drug as far as Bruce was concerned. He wanted that outlet on the Pacific so bad he could taste it. It would put the Valley back into direct touch with the rest of the world, make it a force to be reckoned with.

It would . . . if only the Topangans weren't in the way. They didn't want to follow his orders. They didn't want to follow anybody's orders. Rotten hippies! What were you supposed to do with people like that?

“We'll smash 'em for you, boss,” Garth said confidently. “Just tell us what to do, and we'll take care of it.”

Listening to him made Bruce feel good. Garth was a human pit bull. Point him at something and he'd bite chunks out of it for you. With enough guys like him at your back, you could really accomplish something. And if the hippies stood in your way, hey, that was just their bad luck.

*   *   *

Jared and Connor trudged north up Topanga Canyon Boulevard toward the Theatricum Botanicum, where the Topangans' assemblies had met since not long after the Change. The little outdoor theater held maybe three hundred people. Most of the time, that was plenty.

A redtail lazily circled overhead, peering down at the grassy hillsides in hopes of spotting a rabbit or a ground squirrel. A neighbor rode by on a bicycle. He lifted a hand from the handlebars to wave. “Hey, guys!” he called.

“Hey, Stu,” Jared answered. Connor nodded. Stu pedaled on.

“Lucky bastard,” Connor muttered once Stu was out of earshot. Jared nodded. Bicycle tires were something for which the Topangans had found no good replacement. Time and bad roads had done in most of the ones from before the Change. Jared and Connor had bikes that sat under tarps from lack of rubber. Connor went on, “Ought to go into the Valley and scavenge.”

“The Happy Hunting Ground—if you're lucky,” Jared said. The Valley was square mile upon square mile of houses and shops, almost all abandoned, almost all crumbling. Even this long after the Change, you could find almost anything there. Fancy booze, medicine, clothes from fabrics bugs wouldn't touch, bicycle tires, tools, books, spectacle lenses . . . You could, yeah. But— “The Lancers don't exactly love foreigners on their turf.”

“Fuck 'em. In the neck,” Connor said.

“That's what they want to do to us,” Jared said. “That's what the assembly's about. Bruce is cooking something up.”

“We ought to have spies up there so we'd know what's going on,” Connor said.

“My guess is, we do,” Jared answered. The Valley was a big place. You could be inconspicuous there. In Topanga, strangers stood out more.

“Yeah, but they'd have to do, like, what Bruce's stooges told 'em to most of the time, wouldn't they?” Connor might have been describing the ultimate perversion. Chances were, he thought he was.

“If we aren't careful, we'll all have to do what Bruce's stooges tell us all the time,” Jared said dryly.

“In his dreams!” Connor exclaimed. He didn't really grok that some people did dream that way, and that some of the dreamers made others dream along with them. Bruce Delgado was one of those. He wasn't a monster like that guy up in the Northwest sailors had talked about in the early post-Change years. He was only—only!—a hard-nosed, power-hungry SOB. Whether that made him less dangerous or more was an interesting question, but not one today's assembly would debate.

At the grounds to the Theatricum Botanicum juncos hopped under the shade of small-leaved pepper trees, pecking for seeds and bugs. They were winter birds in most of Southern California, but lived here year-round. Jays screeched in the branches above them. More trees gave some shade to the theater itself. The bench space under the shadows went first; Jared and Connor had to sit in the sun. Jared had long since quit worrying about melanoma. His son may never have heard of it. They were both tan as leather. Something else—quite possibly, one of Bruce's stooges—would kill them before skin cancer mattered.

The five men in folding chairs on the stage were called the Brains when they were called anything at all. Topangans distrusted every kind of authority. That was a big part of what made them Topangans. They sometimes saw the need for it, though. Somebody had to keep a handle on dealing with the Chatsworth Lancers.

Pete Reilly looked at his watch. It was, of course, a rude mechanical, adjusted every so often by gauging noon from the shortest shadow. “Well, let's get this show on the road,” he said. He was the Brainiest Brain of all. He'd landed an engineering slot at UCLA the year before the Change came. That he could think in numbers made him unusual, and unusually useful, in what had been one of the touchy-feely capitals of the world till the Change forced a certain pragmatism on everyone who managed to live through it.

He nodded to Kwame Curtis, who sat to his right. As a very young Marine lieutenant, Curtis had lost three fingers from his left hand in Iraq. He wasn't young any more. He was the Brain who worried about military matters.

“They're going to try something,” he said flatly. “We've got to find out what. We don't know yet. But something. Our boys at the wall spotted Bruce looking us over. He doesn't do that shit for the fun of it.”

His deep voice held an odd mix of scorn and worry. Once upon a time, he'd been a professional soldier. Bruce Delgado was very much an amateur. But Bruce was a shrewd amateur, and he had a lot more men and resources at his disposal than Curtis did.

“What would you do if you were trying to get rid of us?” Reilly asked.

Curtis' medium-brown face twisted into a scowl. “Drop a match in the woods when the wind was right and hope he could come by three days later and stick apples in our mouths after we roasted.”

“Christ!” Jared muttered. Beside him, his son nodded. Jared had feared fires long before the Change. No more chemical-dropping airplanes. No more fire engines. Hell, no more fire departments. No more water mains. Nothing but hand pumps and picks and shovels and prayer.

Reilly nodded as if the answer was no surprise. No doubt it wasn't. The Brains would have worked this out ahead of time. “How are the firebreaks?” he asked Connie Wong.

The only female Brain brushed graying bangs back from her eyes. “Bad,” she answered. “We have so many things to do just to stay alive from day to day, we don't put enough work into the stuff we need maybe once every twenty years.”

People were supposed to spend a couple of hours a week in the woods, cutting brush and knocking down saplings to keep fire from getting a running start. Jared knew he and Connor hadn't gone out there anywhere near so often as they should have.

“We'll have to start taking better care of that,” Reilly said. Heads in the Theatricum Botanicum bobbed up and down. Whether that would translate into work . . . They were Topangans. Organization and discipline didn't come naturally to them.

“We have to do something else, too,” Kwame Curtis said.

“What's that?” Reilly asked, as he was no doubt meant to do.

“We have to let him know that we understand about mutually assured destruction. If he plays with fire, we'll play with fire, too,” Curtis said savagely. “The Santa Anas blow things down onto Chatsworth, same as they do with us. If he wants to fight a war, we'll fight a war. If he wants to burn us out, does he think we can't get around him and light up the Santa Susana foothills? He better not!”