Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (59 page)

“They could probably get it from one of those far-off places—Santa Monica, or even Long Beach,” Connor said. “They'd have to pay through the nose, though.” He smiled, liking the idea.

Jared also liked it. He wasn't sure Pete Reilly would; he didn't know how much Topanga made from selling its larger neighbor sea salt. Well, if the Lancers attacked—and if they lost—he could bring it up.

One of the street signs at the corner of De Soto and Vanowen still stood. Seeing it made Jared guide his horse north, which he hadn't intended to do till he got to Ventura Boulevard. Just on the off chance . . . Connor came with him. He could see they were heading back toward Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

Shouting kids played soccer on a vacant lot that likely hadn't been vacant when the Change came. The way the grass grew suggested the shape of a vanished building. Chances were some long-ago fire took it down. It must have been a calm day, or more would have burnt. Soccer was finally conquering the remains of America. All it needed was a ball and a couple of goals, and you could mark those off with rocks if you didn't even have posts and a crossbar. This wasn't the kind of soccer that would take anyone to the World Cup, but there was no World Cup any more, so who cared?

The next good-sized street north of De Soto was Canoga. As the Topangans neared the corner of Vanowen and Canoga, a slow grin spread across Jared's face. “I'll be damned,” he said. “It is still here! C'mon—we'll stop and get some food.”

“Okay by me,” Connor said.

SIERRA'S
, the sign announced in script, and, under that and in smaller letters,
SINCE
1959. The red-brown paint and the white background were just the way Jared remembered, and just as neat—it had obviously been touched up several times since he last ate here. One or two lightbulbs remained in their sockets after all these years, useless these days except maybe for swank.

Most of the old parking lot was a vegetable garden now. The people who ran the place had put big windows in the east-, south-, and west-facing walls. Sierra's had been a dark place before, even in the daytime. That didn't work so well now. The hitching rail and trough in front of the door were new. Jared and Connor let their horses drink a little, tied them up, and gave them feedbags before going inside.

“Welcome, strangers,” said a gray-haired Hispanic man in a leather apron.

“I'm no stranger,” Jared said, “even if I haven't been here since 1997 or so.”

“Welcome anyway,” the gray-haired man said. “I was here then, too, working for my father. What brings you back after so long?”

“I'm up from Topanga with my son here,” Jared answered. “I thought I'd see if the place was still around—and here you are.”

“Here we are,” his host agreed. “Well, come in, sit down, and get something to eat. First drink is on the house.”

The beer wasn't Dos Equis, the way it would have been. It was homebrew, like all beer these days—good homebrew, though. Choice of meat in the tacos and enchiladas was pork or chicken. Jared wasn't sure it all tasted the way he remembered, but it tasted like Mexican food from a place you'd want to come back to. Both meals came to two dollars. Prices weren't what they had been before the Change. Jared set a dozen sandwich quarters on the table.

“You're too kind,” the gray-haired man murmured as he scooped up the money.

“Worth it,” Jared said. “Eating here makes me feel like I'm my son's age.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Been a few changes since then, though.”

“
Sí,
señor, just a few,” his host agreed gravely. “In the kitchen, for instance. No gas stove now. No running water, either. But we keep going on. What else can we do?”

“We're lucky if we can do that much.” Jared got to his feet. So did Connor, a beat later. “Way too many people didn't.”

“
Sí,
señor,” the other survivor repeated. “Where do you go now?”

“Back to Topanga,” Jared said. “But you can bet I'll come again the next time I head north—say, after your country and mine fight another war.”

“It will be a shame if they do.” The gray-haired man clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Topanga. Another country. Who would have imagined that when we were young and one flag flew from sea to shining sea?”

“Not me. Not you, either. We've got it anyway. Stay well, friend.” With a nod, Jared walked out. His son followed. They swung up onto their horses and headed for their home in that other country.

*   *   *

There were trails through the Santa Monica Mountains. Back before the Change, this had been the Santa Monica Mountains Recreational Area. The way Connor's father and the other old farts told it, people who worked in offices in the Valley and the rest of L.A. drove in cars to the edge of the mountains and then hiked for the fun of it.

Those trails were mostly overgrown now. That they were there at all, though, argued that the old farts weren't just blowing smoke. Connor didn't grok it. Why would you hike for the fun of it? Hiking was work, often hot, sweaty work. Few things you had to do seemed like fun. Most of the time, he had to get from hither to yon on foot.

He was patrolling north and east of the village of Topanga, near Eagle Spring. He wanted to fill his canteen at the spring. Most years, water flowed even through the dry season. Here at the end of summer, it wouldn't be a lot, but he didn't need a lot. He didn't have to have any—the canteen wasn't empty—but he wanted to top up when he got the chance.

Faint in the distance, horns bleated. He cocked his head to one side, gauging the direction. Sure as hell, that racket came from Glenview, where Topanga kept its border with the Valley. “Shit,” Connor muttered. The Chatsworth Lancers were attacking after all. They wouldn't blow the alarm for anything less important.

Or was it a fire? He scanned the horizon, or the limited part of it he could see. No plumes of smoke jumping into the sky. The Riders, then. He wanted to run back to the village and join up with his father to fight off the invaders. He wanted to, but he didn't. His orders were to stay on patrol even if the fighting started. Compared to the Topangans, Bruce Delgado had men falling out of his ass. He might use some to distract with a big, showy fight while others cornholed the canyon from behind.

Connor got to the spring. After he filled the aluminum bottle, he splashed water on his face and arms. It wasn't savagely hot, the way the weather could get this time of year, but it was warm. The water felt good. He took a few steps down the trail to the east, then froze. Somebody was coming the other way.

Quite a few somebodys were coming, as a matter of fact. They weren't making a lot of noise, not any one of them, but they weren't tiptoeing along, either. You couldn't very well tiptoe in country like this. And they were talking among themselves, the way people will just because they're people.

Connor flopped down behind some bushes near the trail. He put a dart in his blowgun and set several more on the ground beside him so he could reload in a hurry with minimum motion. He wanted to make as much trouble as he could, then bug out. The blowgun was the right weapon for that. It was silent and next to invisible. If only it had more range!

When you're nineteen, though, you don't really believe anything bad can happen to you. Not by accident do very young men fill out armies. Here came the soldiers from the Valley. They were on foot and not especially looking for trouble. The guy at the front had what looked like a page torn from a pre-Change road atlas. Peering down at it, he said, “Looks like we're coming to a spring.”

“Good deal,” said someone right behind him. “I'm dry.”

They were within twenty-five yards. Connor took a deep breath, aimed, and blew. The business end of his dart was a tenpenny nail. It caught the guy in the lead right between the eyes. He went down on his face.

“The fuck?” said the Valley man behind him. Then he fell over, too. Connor got him square in the right eye. That was fool luck, and he knew it.

“What's wrong with those assholes?” another soldier asked, and bent down to see. He had his helmet slung on his belt so his brains wouldn't bake as he tramped along. They got punctured instead. Connor put the dart an inch or two behind his ear. Down he went, grabbing at his head.

Which was pressing things as far as they'd be pressed. Connor did his best snake impression to slither away. He left his blowgun and the other darts he'd set out. He'd already done more damage than he'd expected. As soon as he got in back of a reasonably thick tree, he scrambled to his feet and ran like hell. The Valley soldiers were still milling around by their fallen buddies. Every second they gave him was like a lifeline.

Then one of them yelled, “There goes the hippie freak!” That wasn't how Connor thought of himself, but the Valley guys wouldn't be in any mood to discuss semantics. They'd want to kill him, fast or maybe slowly.

Wheet! That was an arrow whistling by. Arrows could kill you from a lot farther away than darts could, and Connor didn't even have the blowgun any more. He didn't feel so brave any more, either. All of a sudden, this wasn't a game or an adventure. They were playing for keeps. He had to play the same way. If he won, he'd get to keep his life.

Thunk! That was another arrow, this one slamming into a tree. He ran harder than ever. He knew the trail better than they did, and some parts of it took a good deal of knowing. But some of the bastards behind him would be faster than he was, damn them. And if he tripped over a root and landed on his face, it was all over but the shrieking.

Whatever fickle gods there were doled out a little more luck for him. The one who tripped and did a faceplant was the fastest Valley soldier. The two men on his heels fell over him, too. By the way they yelled, they'd busted ankles or dislocated shoulders or maybe even both. Hope it's nothing trivial, Connor thought, stealing a phrase from his father.

It was a little more than a mile back to the village. Connor somehow kept ahead of the cursing Valley soldiers chasing him. Because he was literally running for his life, he had an incentive they didn't.

And he got one more break when he got to Topanga village. The men from the Valley could have torn it up in spite of his arriving ahead of them, only a detachment from Fernwood farther down the canyon was on its way north to the fight at Glenview, the only one it knew about.

“The Lancers are coming! The Lancers are coming!” Connor wheezed, making like Patrick Henry or Paul Revere or whoever that guy back in the old days had been.

“Say what?” demanded the man in charge of the little contingent from Fernwood.

Connor pointed in the direction from which he'd come. The sun glinted off the helmets and shields of the Valley men. If that didn't get the message across, he had no idea what would.

“Holy shit!” said the Fernwood commander, so evidently it did. He pointed in the general direction of Eagle Spring, too. “Come on, boys!” he yelled. “We've got this to take care of before we go on to the other. Fred, you head on up to the mouth of the canyon and let 'em know we'll be late.”

“I'll do it,” Fred said, and took off up Topanga Canyon Boulevard. The rest of the Fernwood men drew swords and slung bows and ran toward the houses on the east side of the road. If you were going to fight, fighting from cover beat the hell out of doing it any other way.

Connor trotted back to the east, too. Now he drew his short sword—he hadn't had time to worry about it before. He wondered if he was too tired to fight. Then he realized he had to be fresher than the Valley men.

Arrows whistled by, going in both directions. One of them pierced a fighter from the Valley about halfway between the pit of his stomach and his belly button. He folded up like a concertina, clutching at himself. The screams that burst from his throat had nothing to do with language. They were animal sounds of agony. They made Connor's stomach want to turn over. Anywhere on the trail back from Eagle Spring, he might have made noises like that. Oh, the arrow that got him would have gone in from back to front, but that wouldn't have changed the kind of shrieks he let out.

Brandishing his short sword, he rushed at a Valley man. The other fellow, similarly armed, traded a few strokes with him. Neither of them got home on the other, though Connor had to leap back at the last instant to keep a thrust from shish-kebabing him.

The Valley man didn't press his advantage. His comrade's anguished howls seemed to unsettle him worse than Connor. He must have decided that fighting somebody, anybody, even a little bit satisfied his honor. Now that he'd done it—and now that he'd discovered he and his friends weren't taking the village by surprise, the way they must have hoped—he seemed content to fall back into the brush and woods again.

Connor wasn't all that thrilled about chasing him. The Valley men could stage some kind of ambush, and they might come out on top with it. The Fernwood detachment didn't go charging into the undergrowth, either. They'd made sure the village was okay and would stay that way, which was plenty for them.

“Look at the gutless wonders skedaddle!” a Topangan whooped. “They won't stop till they get back up to the Valley!” Connor hoped the man was right. He thought he was. This prong of Bruce Delgado's attack hadn't worked. Maybe the men would be able to get to Glenview and help the Lancers. But weren't they more likely just to give it up as a bad job?

Up on the crest above the village to the west, a semaphore tower's arms began to wigwag. With luck, the towers would take news of the attack and its failure to the defenders at Glenview. Maybe somebody up there would be paying attention. Or maybe everybody would be too goddamn busy trying to keep the Lancers from breaking through.

A Topangan came up to the gutshot Valley fighter. He knelt and asked him something, probably
Do you want us to try to patch you up or just to get it over with?
When he drew his belt knife and slit the other man's throat, Connor knew what kind of answer he'd got.