The Valley-Westside War ct-6 Read online

  In the home timeline, people called the Harbor Freeway the 110 as often as not. It was part of the U.S. Interstate Highway system. Here, it hadn't joined that system when the Fire fell. A sign left over from the Old Time told the world it was State Highway 11.

  They had to pay a twenty-five-cent toll to get on what was still known as a freeway even if it wasn't free. Dad passed the silver coin to the toll collector without a murmur. Old as it was, beat-up as it was, the Harbor or 110 or 11 or whatever you called it was far and away the best route north.

  Not far from where the Harbor Freeway joined the 405- also called the San Diego Freeway-a hot-air balloon floated five hundred meters in the air, tethered to the ground by a rope. Speedro kept it up there to watch for trouble from a long way off. Seeing it made tears sting Liz 's eyes. In the home timeline, a Goodyear blimp took off and landed right about there. She wondered if the balloon's gas-tight skin had once been part of a blimp.

  The San Diego Freeway swung northwest. The Harbor Freeway went straight north. In the home timeline, it went straight north to downtown Los Angeles. In this alternate, it went straight north to… nothing. Several big bombs had taken out downtown here. The stump of City Hall still stood. It looked like a candle that had burned most of the way down and then slumped over.

  In the home timeline, Los Angeles County had more people than forty-two or forty-three states. Liz couldn't remember which. Even with cars burning clean hydrogen, that Los Angeles still had smog. And so did this one, even with far less than a tenth as many people. The way the mountains and the breezes worked, air pollution always got trapped here. When the Spaniards first saw Santa Monica Bay, they called it the Bay of Smokes. So tears of sorrow weren't the only things bothering Liz 's eyes.

  The horses plodded up the 405. When you lived in a world without cars, without phones, without TV and the Net, nothing happened in a hurry. Dad tried to use the steering wheel to keep the Chevy wagon's wheels from going into potholes. Sometimes he could, and sometimes he couldn't. When they did hit a bump, Liz 's teeth came together with a click. The springs were as old as the rest of the chassis.

  Other wagons used the freeway. So did people on horseback, people on foot, people on bone-shaking bicycles, and one guy on a skateboard of sorts. He'd found Old Time roller skates and nailed them to the ends of a board. When he pushed himself along, he could go faster than he would have walking.

  Dad eyed his style. “He's not ready for the X Games- that's for sure.”

  “They have the sense to wear helmets when they do those stunts,” Mom said. “Knee pads and elbow pads, too. If he falls down, it's just him and the asphalt. I bet the asphalt wins.”

  “People aren't nearly as safe here as they are in the home timeline,” Liz said. “They worry about it a lot less, though. It's funny.”

  “It's crazy.” her mother said.

  “But it's true,” Liz insisted.

  “People here figure something's going to get them. And it usually does.” Dad said. “In the home timeline, they think they ought to stay safe, so they try more. And you know what? Sooner or later, something gets them anyway.”

  “That's true. But it usually takes longer than it would here,” Mom said, and Dad couldn't very well disagree.

  They pulled off the freeway at the Rosecrans ramp, which was still in decent shape. A large sign directed them to GORDON 'S GOOD EATS. Liz knew that offramp in the home timeline, because her family used it to visit cousins. A Denny's sat at that corner there. She stared at Gordon 's. “Oh my God!'“ she said. “It's the same building!”

  “It sure is,” Mom agreed.

  “Prices will be better here,'“ Dad said, which was bound to be true. He added, “I wouldn't be surprised if the food is, too.”

  You couldn't get a hamburger with avocado and vine-ripened tomatoes at a Denny's. On the other hand, you couldn't get an ice-cream sundae or even a Coke at Gordon 's Good Eats, though the orange juice was better than Denny's. When it came to rest-rooms, Denny's won hands down. As she usually did in this alternate, Liz came out of this one wrinkling her nose.

  There was a guarded campground next to Gordon 's. Camping behind barbed wire cost another quarter. To slay in character. Dad grumbled when he paid it. Afterwards, he winked at Liz. There hadn't been quarters in the home timeline for years and years. There, a quarter wasn't enough to worry about. Neither was a dollar, even if they still had dollar coins.

  Dad asked people coming south what things were like on the Westside. “There's gonna be a rumble, man.” one traveler said. “Hasn't happened yet, but there's gonna be.” Another man nodded.

  “Can we get through?” Dad didn't say anything about stopping. “You never could tell who was a spy. or for whom.

  The traveler coming down from the north shrugged. “You can try, like. I wouldn't give you no money-back guarantee.”

  Some of the phrases of Old Time advertising had stuck in the language here.

  The back of the seat reclined in the Chevy. It went back farther than an airplane seat would. You could sleep on it… after a fashion. Liz and her parents lay side by side. One of them wiggling was liable to wake somebody else. Liz had passed plenty of nights she enjoyed more.

  By what had to be a miracle, Gordon 's Good Eats had coffee the next morning. Liz didn't usually like it, but she thought of it as medicine now. Her folks poured down cup after cup. It wasn't cheap, not by this alternate's standards, but Dad didn't say boo.

  They got back on the 405-they didn't have to pay a toll this time-and started north again. With luck, they would get up to Westwood as the sun was setting. Liz thought that was good for all kinds of reasons. If it was dark, the Valley soldiers would have a harder time recognizing them.

  Then Dad passed Mom the reins. He ducked into the back of the wagon. When he returned, his beard was gone. He didn't look like the same person any more. After he took back the reins, Mom did up her hair instead of letting it fall down over her shoulders. She put on a pair of glasses to replace her contacts. She looked different, too, even if not so much as Dad did.

  “Your turn. Liz,” she said when she got through.

  Liz put her hair up, too. Mom showed her how she looked in a mirror from an Old Time compact. She did seem different, but different enough? Maybe for somebody who'd met her only a couple of times.

  “If Dan sees me, he'll know who I am,” she said gloomily.

  “Well, what are the odds?” Dad said. “There's only one of him, after all, and we won't be going right back to where we were.”

  “Besides, they're probably still trying to figure out how7 we disappeared,” Mom said. “They can't think we'd come back again.”

  “I sure hope not,” Liz said.

  Curiosity drew Dan back to the house that had been Liz 's. He knew what they said about cats. He knew he ran the risk of hard, unpleasant work. He went anyway. He was a soldier, but he wasn't an old soldier.

  Sure enough, somebody-a luckless common soldier not named Dan -had chipped away a lot of concrete from the roof of the basement under the basement. Some other soldier-or maybe the same one-had swept up most of it. Most, but not all. Little chunks still gritted under the soles of Dan 's boots.

  Dr. Saul was up on a ladder again. He was poking around up there with a stick. He'd said something about electricity not biting wood. Dan didn't follow all ol that, but Dr. Saul knew his own business best.

  Or maybe nobody knew anything. “This can't be the power pack that keep these lights going,” Dr. Saul insisted. “It can't be, I tell you! It's too small-way, way too small.”

  “Well, if it's not, what is?” Captain Horace asked.

  “I don't know!” Dr. Saul yelled, and then he said something Dan wouldn't have expected to hear from a distinguished scientist.

  Captain Horace was about to say something just as lovely when somebody yelled from up above: “They're clanging the alarm!”

  What Horace said then made Dr. Saul 's remark seem like sweet talk by comparison. What
Dan said made both the officer and the scientist gape at him. He never knew it. though. He was clattering up the stairs, and paid no attention to whatever went on behind him.

  He dashed up the stairs from the basement to ground level, too. By then he noticed Captain Horace wasn't real far behind him. But the captain couldn't catch him. Dan ran out ol the house, down Glendon to Wilshire, down Wilshire to Westwood Boulevard, and down Westwood Boulevard to the freeway line.

  The shooting had already started by the time he got there. Westsiders to the south were banging away at Valley soldiers up on the freeway. “Take your place!'“ Sergeant Chuck yelled when he saw Dan.

  Dan did. He started loading his matchlock. He could see plumes of smoke that showed where enemy musketeers were firing. He worried more about what he couldn't see. Riflemen with Old Time weapons could shoot at him from ranges at which he couldn't hope to reply. They used smokeless powder, too. Unless he saw a muzzle flash, he wouldn't even know where they were shooting from. And if they hit him… No. he didn't want to think about that.

  Then he heard a bigger explosion and saw a bigger flash from a distant window. “Good!” Chuck yelled. “Dog my cats if that wasn't an Old Time rifle blowing up!” Ammunition two long lifetimes old could get touchy-could and did. Yes. riflemen needed several different kinds of courage.

  A more familiar boom made Horace duck. A cannonball flew over his head and landed with a crash somewhere north of the freeway. Westside artillerymen-or would they be from Speedro?-started reloading their piece.

  “Where are our rifles?” Chuck yelled. An Old Time rifle could shoot as far as one of those cannon. A matchlock couldn't come close. Dan didn't waste ammunition trying. The Valley's fearsome.50-caliber machine gun could make hash of the enemy gun crew in nothing flat. Where was it? Nowhere close enough to use, anyway.

  Valley riflemen did start shooting then. Every round they fired meant scrounging for more. What would happen when it all finally ran out or grew too unstable to use? The matchlock musketeer would reign supreme, that was what.

  In spite of the riflemen, the cannon boomed again. This time, the roundshot thudded into one of the freeway supports. It felt like an earthquake to Dan. The supports had to be strong. They'd stood up through real earthquakes. But Dan was pretty sure they weren't meant to stand up to cannon fire. What would happen if one fell down?

  Then a stretch of freeway falls down, too, dummy. Then you fall down.

  He wanted lo do what any soldier in a spot like that would want to do. He wanted to run away. But he couldn't. His superiors would hang him for being a coward-unless they decided to do something even more interesting and painful. That wasn't his biggest worry, though. Letting his buddies down was.

  So he stayed where he was posted. Under cover of the rifle and cannon fire, enemy soldiers ran toward the freeway line. He fired at one of them. The fellow went down. Maybe Dan 's bullet hit him. Maybe someone else's did. Dan never knew for sure, and didn't much care. All he knew was that he had to reload as fast as he could. And he did.

  The Chevy wagon had come a long way up the 405 when the gunfire to the north started up. “Oh, dear!” Liz 's mother said.

  “Oh, no!” Liz said.

  What Liz 's father said meant about the same thing as Oh, dear! and Oh, no! Still, it was a good thing the wagon that had been a car carried no more gasoline. What Dad said would have made the stuff explode.

  Then he said something a little calmer but no less disgusted: “Timing is everything, isn't it?”

  “How are we supposed to get through that?” Mom asked.

  “Carefully?” Dad suggested. Mom and Liz both gave him the same kind of look, the look you gave somebody being difficult on purpose. He sounded hurt as he went on. “Well, I don't see how else we can make it through that unless we feel like getting filled full of holes. Which isn't what I had in mind.”

  “Let me put it another way,” Liz said. When Dad was being difficult, sometimes the best thing to do was be difficult right back. “How do we go around that? Or how do we get to West-wood without getting shot?” Those were two other ways, as a matter of fact. And the second one let Dad keep on being difficult if he felt like it.

  Mom's warning cough worked as well as a lion's warning growl would have. “Did I say anything?” Dad asked plaintively.

  “Not yet,” Mom said. “I suggest you don't, unless it helps.”

  “Okay. The only way to get to Westwood by going around the fighting is probably by going through one of the dead zones.”

  Liz wasn't sure that helped, even if she was pretty sure her father was right. Dead zones were the places where bombs had landed. They were the reason the Harbor Freeway didn't make it up to downtown Los Angeles in this alternate. They were the reason the Santa Monica Freeway didn't make it all the way into Santa Monica. They weren't radioactive any more, not after 130 years. But they were still so battered that hardly anybody lived in them.

  “Can we get the wagon through?” Mom asked.

  “Won't we stand out like bugs on a plate?” Liz said at the same time.

  “'I don't know,” Dad told Mom. To Liz, he said, “No, we won't stand out that bad. Things are flat in the dead zones, but not flat flat, if you know what I mean. That's not what worries me about the whole thing.”

  “And what worries you about the whole thing is…?” Mom prompted.

  “Whether the Westside and Speedro will try to sneak soldiers through the dead zone and get into Westwood that way,” Dad said. “Does the Valley have troops looking west? If they don't, the other side will turn their flank just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  A split second later, so did Liz. “I bet that's what Luke was trying to find out!”

  “I bet you're right,” her father said. “One thing we can be pretty sure of, though-if he did find out, he didn't pass it on to the people farther south. Of course, we don't know if he was the only spy they had. If they were smart, he wouldn't have been.”

  “I don't like the idea of maybe needing to leave the wagon behind,” Mom said. “How can we be traders if we don't have trade goods? And does the Valley have soldiers posted at the edge of the Santa Monica dead zone?”

  “Good question,” Dad said. “If there are no other questions, class is dismissed.”

  “You say that when you mean you don't know,” Liz said.

  “I never worried about it. Did you?” Dad said. Liz had to shake her head. He added, “Besides, they could have sent them out after we, uh, disappeared from this alternate. What it all boils down to is-”

  “Which stupid chance do we want to take?” Mom finished for him.

  He nodded. “Couldn't have put it better myself.”

  The Santa Monica Freeway line held through the first day of fighting. Valley riflemen and musketeers kept Westside and Speedro soldiers from breaking through for a couple of hours. Then the heavy machine gun arrived. It fired off a burst-pock! pock! pock! pock! Those big, heavy booms couldn't be mistaken for anything else. Neither could the way the big, heavy bullets chewed through wood and bricks-and flesh-out to a mile and beyond. As soon as the machine gun opened up. the enemy lost his enthusiasm for advancing.

  “Ha!” Sergeant Chuck yelled. “Thought we forgot about it, did you? Well, let's see how you like it!”

  The Westsiders didn't like it a bit. One of their cannon thundered. The ball flew over the machine-gun crew's heads. You couldn't hide a cannon, not with all the smoke it spat. The machine gunners started banging away at it as soon as it fired.

  If Dan had served the cannon, he would have run for cover as soon as it fired. But what did you do then? You couldn't shoot once and vanish, not if you wanted to win. And so the cannoneers had to come out again and try to reload their piece. One of the men in the machine-gun crew had binoculars much like the Tascos Dan used on sentry duty. As soon as he saw the artillerymen stirring, he let out a yell. The machine gun fired several more bursts.

  Another cannon fired, and another. One cannonbal
l cut a Valley soldier in half about six feet from the machine gun. Dan tried not to look at that, but it had a sick fascination to it. The poor man’s top half didn't die fast enough to suit Dan -or, probably, the fellow himself.

  But the near miss was also just one of those things to the machine-gun crew. They went on shooting as if nothing had happened. Before Dan went into battle himself, he wouldn't have understood that. He did now. If the machine gunners had the shakes, they didn't have time to indulge them. Doing your job, doing what you could for your friends, came first.

  That was also true for the Westsiders and the soldiers from Speedro who seemed to be their allies. They pushed forward again and again, even though the terrible machine gun and the Valley riflemen and musketeers-and, once or twice, even the archers-punished them when they tried. Medics with red crosses on their smocks dragged the wounded to cover. You weren't supposed to shoot at medics-it wasn't sporting. Accidents did happen. For the most part, they were real accidents, not cheating.

  Dan glanced at the sun, which was sliding down toward the Pacific. That was how he thought about it. He didn't worry about the earth turning. He worried about… “What'll we do when it gets dark?”

  “Depends on what those sweet and charming people do,” Sergeant Chuck said, or words more or less to that effect.

  “Okay, cool. Far out, even, man,” Dan said. “What'll they do? What do we do if they try a night attack?”

  “Gotta have fires,” Chuck answered. “We get some big fires going, they'll show us anybody who tries sneaking up.'“ He went on, thinking out loud: “Gotta get fuel together, then. We should have done that already, but I don't think we have, or not enough.” He eyed Dan in a… sweet and charming way.

  “Hey!” Dan squawked. He didn't like shooting at people. He really didn't like people shooting at him. But he didn't want to chop wood and carry it, either. “C'mon, man-cut me some slack. I was the one who made you think of this!”