The Valley-Westside War Read online

  “Send him back where he belongs!” Dan yelled. The soldiers sitting near him laughed and clapped.

  “I’m going to send him back,” Zev said, picking up on Dan’s shout. That made Dan feel pretty special. All the people in the Valley were special, just because they were lucky enough to live here. He’d learned that in school, too. But he felt especially special right now. King Zev went on, “And I’m going to tell him to tell the City Council they can look for our soldiers right behind him!”

  “Right on!” Dan thrust his fist in the air in a gesture that came from the Old Time. “Right on, your Majesty!”

  “Heavy! That’s soooo heavy!” Sergeant Chuck agreed. Soldiers and civilians cheered and pounded on things and made as much noise as they could.

  King Zev raised his hands. The hot Valley sun gleamed off the golden megaphone. “I thank you, my people, for rolling with me on this one.” Now he’d said the closing words. It was official. It was democratic. It was war.

  Two

  What the Westside called a City Council meeting wasn’t like the ones in the home timeline. Liz didn’t think so, anyway. The Council decided whatever it decided and then told the people what that was. That was what the meeting was about.

  When Liz complained to her dad, he smiled a sour smile. “It’s not as different as you think, hon,” he said. “They’re smoother about hiding what they’re really up to in the home timeline—I will say that for them.”

  The nine members of the City Council knew what they wanted to get across. What had been the UCLA Sculpture Garden was now the Westside assembly area. Some of the sculptures still stood. Others—mostly the abstract ones—had disappeared, probably melted down for the metal in them.

  Ambassador Mort was tall and skinny. He wore a doublebreasted Old Time sport jacket over baggy modern pants. “The Valley humiliated me!” he shouted to the people who’d come to the meeting. “Humiliated me, I tell you! They put me on a donkey with my face turned towards its tail and rode me to the border that way. It’s a shame and a disgrace, that’s what it is!”

  It was also the standard way to send an ambassador home when you declared war on his country. Mort didn’t say anything about that. How many of the men and women listening to him knew what the custom was? Not many—Liz was sure of that. The Council wanted to get people all worked up, and knew how to get what it wanted.

  A big man named Cal was the chairman of the City Council. He wore an Old Time jacket, too—an ugly plaid one. He also wore a big white Stetson for no reason Liz could see. “Are we going to let the Valley get away with treating our ambassador that way?” he shouted, his voice high and quick and glib. Liz wouldn’t have wanted to buy a used car from him. “I don’t think so!”

  “No way! No way! No way!” people chanted. They were a claque, a group set up in advance to make the kind of noise their patrons wanted when their patrons wanted it. They were too loud and too smooth to be anything else. When others joined in the chant, they sounded different—less rehearsed, maybe.

  “I’m gonna sic my dog on the Valley!” Cal shouted. That was no idle threat. Cal’s dog was famed—and feared—all over the Westside. There weren’t nearly so many mutations after the atomic war as people had feared. But there were some, and that dog was descended from them. It was a German shepherd about three quarters as big as a horse, with teeth a Tyrannosaurus might have envied. It was, mostly, a nice dog. But if it got mad …

  “Feed King Zev to it!” yelled somebody from the claque. In a moment, that whole group was shouting the phrase. Again, people who didn’t belong joined more slowly. But they did join. The stage managing would have been too open, too blatant, to work in the home timeline—Liz hoped so, anyhow. But it did just fine here.

  “So shall we show the Valley that they can’t tell us what to do?” Cal asked.

  “Yes!” “That’s right!” “Bet your bippy!” people shouted back. Liz didn’t know what a bippy was. She wondered if the men who used the word knew what it meant. Back in 1967, it had probably had a meaning. Now it was just a noise here. People said it without thinking about it. There were words like that in the home timeline, too.

  “Is it war, then?” Cal wanted to make it official.

  “War!” The word came back as a roar. That seemed official enough to Liz.

  It seemed official enough to the head of the Westside City Council, too. “Thanks, folks,” he said. “We’ll lick ’em. You wait and see. When they got a good look at my dog Pots, they’ll be so scared, they’ll run away before the fighting really gets going.”

  Everybody cheered. As the meeting was breaking up, Liz asked her father, “Why does he call that monster of a dog Pots?”

  “Because nobody here seems to remember who the Fenris Wolf was,” Dad said, which both was and wasn’t an answer. He added, “Besides, whatever you call a critter like that, the dog is bigger than the name.”

  There were old children’s books in the home timeline about a dog like that, although he wasn’t mean. What was his name? Clarence? That was close, but it wasn’t right. “Clifford!” Liz exclaimed.

  “Where did you come up with that?” Dad said. “My grandmother had some of those books. She read them to me when I was little. Her mother used to read them to her, she said.”

  “Oh, wow,” Liz said—in the home timeline, a phrase even more old-fashioned than Clifford books. People still used it here, and it did come in handy now and then. She went on, “Will the Westside win?”

  “They sure think so,” her father replied. “But the Valley thinks it’ll win, too, or it wouldn’t have started the war in the first place. I haven’t been up there. I don’t know what all they’ve got. I don’t know how serious they are about the fighting, either. That’s one of the reasons people fight wars—to find out how serious both sides are.”

  “If the Westside weren’t serious, it wouldn’t have built that wall across the 405,” Liz said.

  “Or maybe it just didn’t think the Valley would think the wall was worth fighting about.” Dad shrugged. “If it didn’t, it was wrong. And it looks like a lot of people will get hurt because of that.”

  If the fighting came all the way down into Westwood, the Mendozas could escape back to the home timeline. A transposition chamber would whisk them away in nothing flat. The locals weren’t so lucky. They were stuck here. They had to hope the struggle stayed far away. Liz hoped for the same thing. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to the locals, and she really didn’t want anything bad to happen to UCLA.

  Dan watched a couple of officers load an impressive-looking piece of ordnance onto a horse’s back. “Wow,” he said. “What’s that?” The cartridges gleamed in the sunshine. Each one looked as big as his thumb. The weapon had to come from the Old Time. Nobody nowadays could make anything like that.

  “Machine gun—.50-caliber,” one of them answered proudly. “We test-fired it, and it shoots great.”

  “That is so cool!” Dan said. “I didn’t know anything like that was left in the armory.”

  “It didn’t come from the armory,” the captain said. “Scrounger found it in a house.”

  “No kidding?” Dan said, and the officer nodded. Dan went on, “Ordinary people could have a piece like that in their houses? Wow! Old Time must’ve been something else.” That gun might beat the Westside all by itself now.

  “Old Time was something else,” the other officer said.

  “Oh, yes, sir.” Dan knew better than to show he disagreed with any officer, even when he did. But he didn’t disagree with this one. “Ordinary people had guns like this, the way folks have belt knives now. Makes you wonder what all the kings—no, they called them presidents—had, though.”

  “They had the Fire,” the first captain said grimly. “They had it, and they used it. And that’s how come we don’t have so much any more.”

  He was right about that. The Russians threw the Fire at America, and then the Americans threw it back. That was what the schoolbooks said, and wh
y would they lie? Dan didn’t know exactly where Russia was. Somewhere far away—he was sure of that, anyhow. Farther than TJ, farther than Vegas, farther than Frisco. You went a whole lot farther than that, you probably fell off the edge of the world. Schoolbooks also insisted the world was round. Again, why would they lie? But Dan had his doubts. The world sure looked flat to him. Well, bumpy in spots, but basically flat.

  The officers with the machine gun looked at him, then at each other. The second one spoke up: “I bet you’ve got something you need to do, don’t you, soldier? If you have time to rubberneck, we’ll find you something to do.”

  “Oh, no, sir. I’ve got plenty. It was just seeing the fancy gun that made me stop, that’s all.” Dan saluted and beat a hasty retreat. You didn’t always have to be busy in the army. But you always had to look busy. If you didn’t look busy, somebody would make sure you were.

  He hustled over to the barracks. He had a whetstone in his kit. He started using it to sharpen the points on his arrows. He’d sharpened them just the other day. They couldn’t very well have got dull between then and now. Anybody who saw him, though, would think he had plenty of work and didn’t need anything more. That was the point, all right.

  Had officers and sergeants been so silly back in the Old Time? Dan didn’t want to believe it. They’d known so much. They’d been able to do so many things. They wouldn’t have wanted soldiers to waste time for the sake of wasting time … would they?

  Of course, in the end the Old Time folks, the Americans and the Russians, had blown themselves up. They’d thrown away all their marvels, thrown them into the Fire. In school, the books and the teachers said they’d been about to fly to the moon before they went to war instead. The moon! There were still pictures of airplanes, and nobody doubted that the Fire flew before it fell. But the moon! Could people really have gone there?

  If they could have … If the people of Old Time could have gone to the moon but chose to blow themselves up instead … If they chose to do that, were they as smart as everybody always said they were? Or were they amazingly, unbelievably, dumb?

  Dan stopped sharpening. He just stood there, file in one hand, arrow in the other. It wasn’t against the law to think the people of Old Time were dumb—not quite. It wasn’t against any religion to think they were dumb, either—not quite. But if you had a thought like that, you probably didn’t want to admit it to anybody, either. People would call you a weirdo or a fruitcake or even a nonconformist. You didn’t want to get hung with a label like that. It could stick to you for the rest of your life.

  “What’s happening, Dan?” Sergeant Chuck appeared behind him at just the wrong moment. Sergeants had a knack for doing that.

  “Nothing, Sergeant.” Dan started scraping the point against the file again. “I just saw our machine gun. It’s too much!” That should be safe.

  And it was. “Wait till the Westsiders see it. Wait till they meet it up close and personal. They’ll freak out, man—you better believe it.” Chuck smiled as if he could hardly wait. That was part of what made him a sergeant.

  Dan was ready to go to war, but he wasn’t in any big hurry about it. King Zev and his officers were. The next morning, right at sunup, Dan set his helmet on his head. He was just an archer—not a fancy kind of soldier at all. And yet he still wore a genuine U.S. Army steel helmet from the Old Time. If that didn’t prove what a rich and powerful kingdom the Valley was, he didn’t know what would.

  The metal facing on his shield came from an Old Time car door. You could see where, once upon a time, it had said Falcon. Falcons were swift, fierce birds, so he thought that was a good omen. His shirt and trousers and boots were modern, but he thought his belt buckle came from the days before the Fire fell, too.

  Captain Kevin made a little speech before his company set out. “When we march today, we’re going to start marching up Victory Boulevard,” he said. “And every step we take till this war is done, we’re going to stay on the road to victory. The Westsiders can’t stop us, because we’re right and they’re wrong. We’re tougher than they are, too. If they don’t know that yet, they’ll find out.”

  Up Victory Boulevard they went, along with the rest of King Zev’s soldiers. There had to be two or three thousand men in that army, maybe even more. They sang as they marched, alternating old songs like “Satisfaction” and “Hound Dog” with new ones like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our King.” Dan couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he enjoyed making noise.

  Some of the companies marched south on the 405 when they got to the old freeway. They were going to attack the wall. Dan’s unit—and, he was excited to see, the machine gun as well—went south along Sepulveda Boulevard instead. They could support the troops on the 405, because the road and the freeway ran close together.

  Still other Valley soldiers kept heading east. From what Dan heard, they would go south by way of Laurel Canyon. The thinking was that the Westsiders wouldn’t be looking for a three-pronged attack. The City Council down there didn’t know how strong and how determined the Valley was. Captain Kevin had said it best—they’d find out.

  It was a hot day, like almost any summer day in the Valley. Wearing a steel hat sure didn’t make it any cooler. Sweat ran down Dan’s face. “Drink plenty of water!” Captain Kevin called to his men. “Eat some salt, too. But remember to drink. Nobody keels over before we go into action, right?”

  “Yes, sir!” Dan shouted along with the rest of the men. He swigged from his canteen and crunched sea salt between his teeth. Sweat was wet and salty. It only stood to reason that salt and water put back what you sweated away.

  For a while, stores and apartment buildings lined Sepulveda Boulevard. After the men passed the 101, though, those petered out. There were some houses on either side of the road. Their windows, empty now of glass, looked on the marching men like the eye sockets of so many skulls. Dan wished that hadn’t crossed his mind. It gave him the creeps. His free hand twisted in a sign to hold evil away.

  His shield and the helmet and his quiver and the long knife he wore on his belt and the pack with his rations in it all started to feel heavy as lead. Do I really need all this stuff? he wondered. Can I throw some of it away?

  He tried to imagine what Sergeant Chuck would say if he did. Then he tried to imagine what the sergeant would do to him if he did. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pretty. He hung on to his stuff.

  Soldiers lined up to fill their canteens at a cistern. Without those, the Valley would have been in trouble. So would the Westside and all the other little countries that made up Greater L.A. You had to save all the winter water you could, or else you’d run low in the summertime.

  A medic poured brandy into each canteen—not too much. It kept down the runs. Anybody who improved the water too much caught it from his sergeant. After the men drank, they pressed on.

  Along with her father and mother, Liz watched the Westside’s soldiers march toward battle. They tramped west along Sunset toward the 405 and Sepulveda. Here as in the home timeline’s Southern California, the very richest of the rich lived north of Sunset.

  There were differences, though. In the home timeline, hardly any of those super-rich people had children who joined the army. Lots of young officers came from that group here. They were willing to put their lives on the line for what they believed in.

  In other words, they were willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of a wall across the top of Sepulveda Pass. The more Liz thought about it, the crazier it seemed. She wondered what would happen if she said so to one of the soldiers in the muddy green, not-too-uniform uniforms. No, actually, she didn’t wonder. She had a pretty good idea. She’d get arrested for being unpatriotic, and things would go downhill from there.

  So, feeling like a hypocrite, she cheered and clapped her hands. One of the standard-bearers grinned at her. Why not? She was a pretty girl not far from his age. The Westside flag had a bear on it. Part of the bear seemed to come from the one on the old California state fla
g, part from the UCLA Bruin. That left it looking fierce and friendly at the same time, but the Westsiders didn’t care.

  “How big is this army?” Liz asked her father.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “A couple of thousand men? Something like that.”

  “Are they enough?”

  Her father shrugged again. “We’ll find out,” he said, which wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

  The cheering got louder. Here came Cal and his dog Pots. The beast looked as if it could eat half the Valley’s army all by itself. Behind Cal came a horse that carried armor for Pots. The chunks of iron looked like the ones that had protected horses back in the days when knights were bold and life was nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes, Liz thought, remembering AP Euro.)

  Cal waved his big white Stetson. “We’ll get ’em!” he shouted to the people. “They won’t come past us!”

  “Ils ne passeront pas,” Dad murmured. “That goes back a couple of hundred years. I wonder if he knows.”

  “Ask not what the Westside can do for you,” Cal added. “Ask what you can do for the Westside!”

  Liz’s father stirred again. That one rang a bell with her, too. She remembered grainy black-and-white video from the middle of the twentieth century. Even across almost a century and a half of changing hair and clothes styles, she remembered thinking how handsome John Kennedy was. Maybe he hadn’t been the greatest President. Nobody’d cared much, then or later. An aura of glamour surrounded him to this day.

  It did here, too. Kennedy half-dollars weren’t just coins in this alternate. They were amulets. Only rich men had them, and mostly wore them on chains around their necks. The coins were credited with everything from magically stopping bullets—more irony, when you thought about it—to curing smallpox.

  Smallpox … Liz rubbed at her left arm. In the home timeline, the disease was extinct. But she’d had to get vaccinated before she came to this alternate. People here vaccinated, too—they remembered that much. Not everybody got vaccinated, though, and the disease still broke out every now and then. The pocked faces of survivors were … appalling.