The Wanderer (35 page)

Only after he and Margo had studied the cars for quite a while (or for an interminable, incredulous, eye-darting moment) did they begin to see the people. It was as if some universal law forced vision to descend by size-stages.

People!—three or four to each car, at least. Many of them still sitting in them, by God. Others standing or walking between them, a few standing or sitting on fabric-or-cushion-spread car roofs. Off to the left, beyond the burnt swathe, many people had climbed the fence and set up blanket-and-beach-towel-shaded bivouacs, yet few if any of them seemed to have gone far from the freeway that penned their vehicles; perhaps they figured the jam would be cleaned up somehow in a few hours or a day.

And there wasn't much walking around—they were sticking to the shade.

It was a stale old joke, Hunter recalled, that Angelenos, using cars even to visit the people across the street, had forgotten how to walk—one of those jokes that are little more than the unretouched truth.

Just to the left of the Monica Mountainway outlet and car-crush, a clutch of black and white police cars was drawn up on a cleared stretch of shoulder, in a semicircle reminiscent of a wagon-train camp. This "laager" guarded a car-wide break in the fence, looking as if it had been done with heavy wire-clippers. A half-dozen police were inside it, and right now one of them took off on a motorcycle through the break, immediately turning and gunning along north on the flat outside the fence. A few people came out of their bivouacs and seemed to hail him, but he kept on, and they stood there as his dust-wake broadened and billowed around them.

To the right, where the big black cloudbank was growing rapidly higher, there were fewer bivouacs but more people in the open—slim people moving around fast, mostly, waving and leaping, gathering in clumps, dispersing, regathering. And it seemed to be from this direction that there, was coming, quite tinny and faint, the squawk and squeal and drumbeat of jazz.

Between the two groups of people behaving so differently, there was a hundred-yard stretch, including the Mountainway outlet, that had no people at all in it, even sitting in the cars—except for ten or so stretched here and there on the ground.

Hunter wondered for a moment why they chose to rest in the baking sun, before it occurred to him they were dead.

He was fringe-aware of his comrades from the school bus and the truck gathered around the Corvette, too. Now he beard more footsteps coming and the Little Man saying, "Look at that cloudbank. I don't know that I've ever heard of a wet southeast wind like this in Southern Cal," and McHeath replying, "Maybe the ocean's broke through and filled the Salton Sea and other low spots, Mr. Dodd. And with—gee!—maybe a hundred miles of tidewater, there'd be lots of evaporation."

Hunter continued to scan the overpowering scene ahead.

Three of the slim, active ones came into the no-man's land along the shoulder, moving in a cavorting, dancing run. One of them, by his gestures, might be carrying and swigging from a bottle. They'd come sixty yards when there was a crackle of gunfire from the police-car camp. One of the three fell—hard to tell at this distance whether he lay quiet or writhed. The other two vaulted over the nearest line of stalled cars and hid.

Hunter put his arm around Margo tight. "My God, Doc, what goes on?" he demanded.

"Yeah, for crissakes, Doc, tell us what you can see through the glasses," Wojtowicz put in. "It looks like war."

"It is," Doc reported crisply. "Now listen to what I say, everybody that wants to," he went on loudly, continuing to scan through the glasses, "because I'm not going to tell it twice and there'll be no time for anybody else to sight-see with these. It's a war, or a big skirmish, anyhow, between a lot of young people and the older people—or I should say the police helped by a few older people, but most of the rest of those neutral or at any rate useless. Big kids versus police protecting families. It's the Day of the Children.

"Those slim ones are teenagers, mostly. They're drinking—I can see a liquor truck bust open and kids handing out bottles. They got a live jazz band going in a cleared space. There are fights—knife and fist. A gang with sledges is smashing car windows and beating in car bodies for no sane reason."

Doc censored from his account the acts of stark lovemaking he noted inside the cars—for shade rather than privacy, it seemed—the two girls dancing naked near the jazz band, the wanton beatings-up and terrorizings, and—in the other direction—the group draining a car radiator and eagerly drinking the…well, he hoped there weren't too many additives in the water.

"But not all their violence is against cars or each other," be went on. "There's a bunch of them sneaking up right now between the empty cars towards the police camp. A few of them have guns, the rest bottles.

"I think the police have set up a little ambush on their side. At any rate I can see two or three of them crouched behind cars in the middle of the jam.

"But before the battle starts, we're going to be out of here, heading back for Mulholland," he went on in a louder voice, handing the glasses to Rama Joan and turning to face his crowd. "Doddsy! McHeath! Have Pop and Hixon turn their cars—there's room to do it—and…"

"You mean you're asking us to turn tail and run?" Hixon himself demanded loudly from where he was standing, rifle in hand, just beyond the Ramrod. "When there's decent folks down there about to be swamped? When we could turn the tables easy with that gravity gun? Look, I been a cop myself. We got to help them."

"No!" Doc rasped back at him. "We've got to protect ourselves and get the momentum pistol to some responsible science group—and while it's still got power in it. How much charge is there left in the thing, Margo?"

"About one-third," she told him, checking the violet line.

"See?" Doc continued to Hixon, "the thing has only four or five big shots left in it, at most. There are miles of those maniacs down there on 101. If we mix in, we'll only turn a little battle into a big one. What's down there is dreadful, I'll admit, but it's something that's going on all over the world right now and we can't afford to lose ourselves in it—one bucket of water tossed on a burning city! No, we backtrack! Go back and turn your truck around, Hixon—"

"Wait a minute, Doc!" This time it was Margo who interrupted, in a ringing voice.

She moved in front of the Corvette.

"That's Vandenberg Three down there," she said, pointing with the momentum pistol at the three white buildings. "Morton Opperly may still be there. We've got to check."

"Not one chance in fifty!" Doc barked at her. "Not in five hundred. He'll have been

'coptered out—maybe by the one we saw this morning. No!"

"I've seen people moving inside," Margo lied. "You agreed the idea is to get him this pistol. We've got to check."

Doc shook his head "No! Too crazy a chance to take for next to nothing."

Margo grinned at him. "But I've got the pistol," she said, holding it against her chest,

"and I'm going to take it down there if I have to walk."

"That's telling him!" Hixon cheered excitedly.

"All right, Miss Strongheart, then listen to me," Doc said, bending forward toward her. "You go down there with that pistol, walking or in a car, and some crazy sniper picks you off, or you get jumped from three sides at once, and Opperly doesn't get the weapon—those maniacs do. It's got to stay here.

"But I'll make you a proposition, Miss Gelhorn. You go down there without the weapon—I'll give you my revolver—and bring Opperly back, or just find he's there, and we'll make the deal with him. How about it?"

Margo looked at Hunter. "You drive me?" He nodded and jumped for the sedan.

She came around the side of the Corvette and held the momentum pistol toward Doc.

"Trade." He gave her his revolver and took it. Hunter started the sedan and drove it alongside the red car.

Hixon came forward. "Hey, I'm going too."

"You want him?" Doc asked. Margo nodded. He asked Hixon: "You promise just to help them find Opperly?"

Hixon nodded, muttering, "Whoever
he
is."

Doc said: "Okay then, but you're the last one we can spare. No more volunteers!" He barked the last almost into the face of McHeath, coming up eagerly. "Gimme your rifle,"

he told the boy. "You climb up those rocks back there—" he pointed to the easier gatepost—"and watch for us being outflanked…by anybody, including police!"

Hixon piled into the back of the sedan, Margo got in beside Hunter, Doc vaulted down and leaned an elbow on her window. "Hold on a second," he said, scanning the jammed highway again just as action broke out there.

A dozen figures popped up from behind and between cars near the police camp.

They threw things. Guns cracked and two or three of them fell. Things hit the police cars.

Flames exploded.

"Molotov cocktails," Hixon whispered, gnawing his lip.

Doc said: "Now's a good time—they all got other things to think of." He shoved his head in the window.

"I just got one thing to say to you," he growled at the three of them. "Bring yourselves back, you bastards!"

Barbara Katz sat in the topmost spread of the big, pale, rung-like, right-angling branches of a gigantic dead magnolia tree, the westering sun hot on her back, and watched east under the blue sky for the Atlantic to come mounding back from Daytona Beach and Lake George over the neck of Florida. From time to time she tried to study the figures on the darkly-creased, sweat-stained tidal chart on the back of the calendar page Benjy had torn off for her yesterday morning, although she knew it could hardly apply closely any more, if at all. But there had been a high tide last night at three a.m. and so there should be another around the middle of this afternoon.

In the next spread of the branches down old KKK was tied to his seat with blanket strips around the big trunk, which shielded him some from the sun. Hester sat beside him, supporting his slumping head and easing his position as best she could. Nearby Helen and Benjy had their spots. Benjy had the rope he'd used to draw up the old man and some other things.

In their soiled and torn pale gray uniforms the three Negroes looked like bedraggled and ungainly brown-crested silver birds as they perched there high in the huge, nearly leafless tree.

The tree rose from a slight mound half covered by the exposed section of its own thick gray roots, on which the mud-spattered Rolls now was parked.

South of the mound stretched a tiny graveyard, its wooden headboards sand-drifted and some pushed down and all sedge-draped by the scour of the last high tide. At the foot of the graveyard was a small wooden church that had once been painted white. It was shifted a dozen feet off its foundation bricks and strained and twisted at the corners, though not broken apart. The brown mark of the tide went up about eight feet on it, almost to the flaking but newer-painted black letters over the door, which read
CHURCH OF JESUS SAVER
.

Barbara squeezed her eyes shut several times rapidly. It looked to her as if several patches of the blue sky had come down onto the flat, brown-green land to the east, a little like the watery reflections one sees far ahead on a level concrete road on a burning hot day. The blue patches grew and merged. No longer conscious of blinking, Barbara watched with an intensity approaching that of trance. Second linked to second and minute to minute seamlessly, as if the hooves of time had halted, or as if something in her stood still so that she could no longer hear their pounding.

Nor—so attentive was she to the strange phenomenon of the sky overflooding the land—did she much hear the physical roar coming louder and louder from the east, or the awed, excited calling back and forth of the three great gray featherless fowl beneath her, or even much feel the tree shake and strain as the waters came surging around it, or hear Helen's scream.

But it did seem to her that the whole earth was tipping and sliding up into the sky as that blue came reaching dizzyingly underneath, and she leaned farther and farther backwards and would have fallen, except that now a body came pressing up against her side and a strong arm came around her back, bracing her.

"You hold on, Miss Barbara," Benjy was shouting in her ear. "You watch so hard you fall."

She looked around the watery plain. Florida was gone. The Church of Jesus Saver was floating off upside down with its eight short legs crookedly in the air.

She looked down again. The magnolia, its height halved, was a lonely midsea refuge. She thought of the Rolls Royce and giggled.

"I don't know about that, Miss Barbara," Benjy said, diviningly. "I hoist out the battery and 'stributor and some more parts. Grease others heavy—might help. Plug up gas tank tight at both ends, same for oil. Tide go down, she
might
run again, though I be surprise."

The tree swayed with the surge and then swayed back. Helen squawked. Hester clutched at her. Benjy laughed crowingly. He said to Barbara: "But I still got hopes—some."

Ross Hunter, driving conservatively fast, swung the sedan around the last curve. Now the road lay straight along the high mesh fence of Vandenberg Three.

Margo hit his shoulder and pointed at a small open door in the first corner of the fence.

Hunter didn't slow down. "No good," he grunted. "I'd try for a gate that can take the car."

"Hurry it up," Hixon urged from the back seat.

The landscape turned suddenly spectral. The big cloudbank had cut off the sun.

There was thunder. Through the thunder, guns cracked ahead. A police car came out of the flaming laager through the opening clipped in the freeway fence, plunged down a little slope, and headed in their direction, bumping and jouncing around the edge of the burned car-crush at the mouth of Monica Mountainway. A second police car came out, hind end foremost but backing fast, and followed the first.

Hunter slowed. There was a big gate with an empty guard booth. The gate was open. He swung through it as a third police car, this one front end first, escaped from the laager.