The Valley-Westside War Read online

  And people from the home timeline did a brisk business selling perfect copies of Kennedy halves. Yes, it was taking advantage of superstition. But the superstition would have been there whether they took advantage of it or not. In other alternates, Crosstime Traffic sold religious relics of several different kinds. What was the difference, really? Liz had trouble seeing any.

  For that matter, what was the difference between superstition and religion generally? Lots of people had spilled lots of ink and killed lots of trees and pushed around lots of electrons trying to define the answer. So far, most of what they said boiled down to What I believe is religion, and what those foolish people over there believe is superstition.

  There was no evidence that knocking on wood made the world less likely to go wrong. There was no evidence that praying in a church or synagogue or mosque made the world less likely to go wrong, either. That didn’t stop people from doing both kinds of things. When it first became plain that science explained how things happened—not necessarily why, but how—better than religion did, lots of “experts,” from Karl Marx on down, predicted that religion would wither up and die.

  It hadn’t happened in the home timeline. It also hadn’t happened in any high-tech alternate Crosstime Traffic had found. Most people weren’t rational enough, or weren’t rational often enough, to be satisfied believing this was all there was. By now, the “experts” doubted they ever would. That might prove as wrong as the earlier experts’ certainty that religion would fail.

  In low-tech alternates, religion was the only game in town. More and more, that was how things worked in this one. Liz had a hard time blaming the locals for feeling that way. What had science done for them here? Dropped them in the frying pan and turned up the heat, and that was about it.

  Oh, the Westsiders still called themselves scientific. But they still called themselves democratic, too. That was another joke, except it wasn’t funny.

  A priest and a rabbi and a minister marched with the Westside army. No doubt a priest and a rabbi and a minister marched with the Valley’s army, too. And no doubt both sides were sure God meant them to win. Some things didn’t change no matter what alternate you were in—and no matter how much you wished they would.

  Supply wagons made a dull close to a military parade, but no army was much good without them. Mules and horses twitched their ears as they trudged along. It wasn’t their war, but people made the work anyway. They didn’t like it, not that the teamsters cared. The draft animals got even less vote than the people had at the City Council meeting.

  After the soldiers and the wagons passed, the Westsiders started drifting back toward their homes. “Show’s over,” Liz’s mother said. “Now we hope we don’t seen the soldiers for a while, ’cause if we do—”

  “Something’s gone wrong somewhere,” Dad finished for her.

  “Well, yes.” Mom sent Dad a dirty look. Liz didn’t blame her. She didn’t like getting her lines stepped on, either.

  The dirty look sailed over Dad’s head the way a badly aimed arrow would have. He said, “Let’s get back to the house.”

  Getting back to the house, of course, meant walking back to the house. That was a couple of miles—Liz more readily thought of it as three kilometers—and took more than half an hour. Going from one place to another here was like traveling in the home timeline in one way. Ten minutes of travel was a short trip, half an hour was kind of medium, an hour was long, and two hours was a pain in the neck reserved for something that had better be special.

  But how far you went in your time shrank drastically. Here you traveled on foot, or maybe on horseback. If you were very rich, you might have a carriage. Some bicycles survived, but their rubber tires didn’t. With wooden tires, riding them was a good way to shake your kidneys loose.

  And so you mostly didn’t go more than four or five miles—six or eight kilometers—from where you lived. As they had in the days before trains and cars and planes, people lived their whole lives within twenty or thirty miles of where they were born. If this alternate didn’t regain its technology, lots of little, very different peoples would sprout from the ruined tree trunk of the USA.

  That was already starting to happen. The Westside and the Valley weren’t just independent countries. People in both of them spoke English, but it wasn’t quite the same English. People from the Valley had a nasal accent that made it pretty easy to pick them out from Westsiders by ear. In another few hundred years, the two dialects might turn into separate languages. Even if they didn’t, it was pretty clear that people from Southern California would have trouble understanding people from the upper Midwest. And both those groups would have trouble with the language they spoke in the deep South.

  Liz looked around to make sure no locals could overhear. When she saw they couldn’t, she asked, “Is what I’m getting out of the library helping you figure out just where this alternate split off from the home timeline?”

  “It will help. It’s bound to,” her mother answered.

  “It may take a while, though,” her father added. “I envy ancient historians. There’s only so much for them to know. It’s not like that when you get up into the twentieth century. You’re drowning in data. It does seem plain that the breakpoint has to do with the Vietnam War, though.”

  “We already knew that,” Liz said. “Or we were pretty sure, anyhow.”

  Her father nodded. “It was always a good bet, since the big war started while the Vietnam War was going strong. But it still isn’t obvious whether the U.S. escalation here scared the Russians enough to make them start throwing rockets, or whether the United States threw them first when we didn’t like what Russia and China were doing.”

  “Whoever shot first, an awful lot of people on both sides ended up dead.” Liz eyed this sorry version of the UCLA campus. “And there’s been nothing but trouble ever since.”

  “Nobody’s going to tell you you’re wrong, hon,” her father said. “At that, they got off lucky here. They got bombed back to the Middle Ages, but they didn’t get bombed back to the Stone Age.”

  “They didn’t all get killed, either,” Mom said. “That happened in some alternates.”

  Liz nodded. People really could be stupid. Just in case the home timeline didn’t have enough examples of that, the alternates offered even more. People in the home timeline hadn’t been stupid some ways. They hadn’t tried blowing one another off the map with H-bombs, for instance. They were proud of that, and relieved about it, too.

  Seeing what other people, people much too much like them, had done in different alternates should have made them prouder of escaping—and also more relieved. To some degree, it did. But only to some degree. Too many people in the home timeline still had axes to grind. Big wars seemed unlikely these days. Terrorist strikes, on the other hand …

  “I’ve got a question,” Liz said.

  “What?” her mother and father asked together.

  “What happens if something now makes the home timeline split into two alternates?” Liz said. “They’d both have Crosstime Traffic in them. Which one would be the real home timeline?”

  Mom and Dad looked at each other. They walked on for several steps without answering. At last, her father said, “If there are no other questions, class is dismissed.”

  “Dad!” Liz said reproachfully.

  “We’re just historians. We can’t deal with questions like that,” her mother said. “You need to talk to the chronophysicists. If anybody can tell you, they’re the ones.”

  “Talk to them at a convention, after they’ve got a few drinks under their belts,” Dad added. “If you get ’em when they’re in the lab, they’ll look wise and tell you things like that can’t happen. I hope they’re right. Everybody does.”

  “How will we find out?” Liz asked.

  “The same way people usually do, I bet,” her father answered. “The hard way.”

  “Come on! Come on! Get moving!” Sergeant Chuck booted Dan in the seat of the pants. H
e didn’t kick him hard enough to hurt, but it was plenty hard enough to wake him.

  Chuck went on shouting and booting other soldiers awake. Dan yawned and stretched and looked around. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but it would soon. It was already bright enough to see colors. Only a handful of the brightest stars still shone, and they faded out as he watched.

  He pulled a square of hardtack and some smoked sausage from his pack. Some soldiers crumbled up their hardtack and fried it in bacon grease. He just crunched on his. You needed good teeth to do that. He had good teeth, and knew how lucky he was to have them. Wounded soldiers got ether before surgeons went to work on them. Ordinary people with toothaches? You needed to be rich to get knocked out before a dentist pulled a tooth that was driving you nuts.

  “Everybody ready?” Captain Kevin called. “You better be ready, ’cause we’re moving out!”

  Dan stuffed a last chunk of sausage into his mouth. As he chewed on it, he probably looked like a hamster with its cheek pouches full. He didn’t care. He kind of liked hamsters. They were a lot cuter than rats and mice. They didn’t have pointy noses, and they didn’t have long, naked tails, either.

  Old men and women said their grandparents said there hadn’t been any wild hamsters before the Fire fell. There also hadn’t been any wild iguanas or parrots. And lakes and ponds hadn’t had any piranhas in them. Dan wasn’t sure he believed that. Wasn’t it like saying there’d been a time without possums and starlings and cabbage butterflies? If there had been a time like that, nobody remembered it now.

  “Form up!” the captain shouted. “Chances are we’ll be in action later on today.”

  The soldiers who were about Dan’s age hurried into place. They were as eager as he was. Older men, men who’d gone to war before, didn’t move so fast. Dan thought that was because they were old. That it might be because they’d already seen battle and didn’t much care for it never crossed his mind.

  As carefully as if handling gold and precious jewels, the machine-gun crew loaded their lovely weapon onto the pack horse’s back. Extra ammunition went onto another horse. When the men waved to Kevin, he got the company moving.

  “Be alert—the enemy may have pushed scouts forward,” he warned.

  That made Dan try to look every which way at once. Old Sepulveda gave scouts plenty of places to hide. One could lurk in any of those dead houses, watching the Valley soldiers with field glasses. But if one was, how would he get word back to his commanders? This wasn’t the Old Time. He wouldn’t have a television or a radio or a telephone handy.

  Here and there, people did still use telegraphs. Could a scout have strung wire out behind him so he could click away and pass on information like that? Dan supposed it wouldn’t be impossible, but he didn’t think it would be easy.

  And how much did it matter? As they started to march, they moved uphill, toward the top of the pass. The Westsiders were already looking down into the Valley. If they didn’t know King Zev’s army was moving toward them, they were even dumber than Dan thought. Could you be that dumb and live? He doubted it.

  That set him looking toward the top of the pass. He already knew there was a wall across the 405. Was there one across Sepulveda, too? Squint as he would, he couldn’t tell. Sepulveda was lower than the freeway, and didn’t show up so well against the sky.

  Something howled, up ahead in the distance. The noise seemed to echo from the brush-covered walls of the pass. The hair at the back of his neck stood up. “Is that a coyote?” he asked, trying not to sound scared.

  “If it is, it’s a coyote the size of the Coliseum,” Sergeant Chuck answered. The saying reached back to Old Times. The Coliseum didn’t exist any more. One of the bombs that got L.A. and ended the good days came down not far from it.

  “Does Cal really have a dog the size of a house?” Yes, Dan was nervous.

  “I don’t know. We’ll see what comes out of the tunnel, that’s all,” Chuck said. Old Sepulveda went through a cliff near the highest part of the pass. The Westside held both ends of the tunnel. Dan would have liked it better if the border went through the middle. Then either side could have blocked the other from using that way through. As things were, the Westside had the edge.

  We’ve got to beat them, that’s all, he thought. Then we’ll hold both ends of the tunnel, and let’s see how they like that.

  A cannon boomed. He thought the sound came from near the barricade the Westsiders had built. It was a black-powder boom, not the sharper crack of Old Time explosives. If you were on the wrong end of a cannonball, though, you wouldn’t care one way or the other.

  “Come on! Step it up!” Captain Kevin shouted. “Our friends, our neighbors, are in action. We’ll help them out! Hurrah for King Zev!”

  “Hurrah for King Zev!” Dan yelled. Along with the rest of Kevin’s company, he trotted forward.

  Another boom, this one from near the mouth of the tunnel. Dan could see this cannonball flying through the air. He ducked. He couldn’t help himself. He felt ashamed till he realized the other Valley soldiers were ducking, too. The cannonball hissed over his head and smashed into an empty house with a noise like a thunderclap. Startled crows flew up, screeching.

  “Spread out!” Kevin and Chuck yelled the same thing at the same time. “That way, they won’t be able to get so many of you with one round,” Chuck added.

  Oh, boy, Dan thought. It didn’t mean they wouldn’t be able to get him. It just meant they’d have to work a little harder, or he’d have to be a little less lucky. He wished he hadn’t thought of that.

  There wasn’t a whole lot of room to spread out in, either. The cracked asphalt of Old Sepulveda and the wider expanse of the 405 were the only good routes through the pass. Wreckage and undergrowth clogged the rest.

  That horrible howl came again. “Holy moley!” somebody shouted, pointing south. “There he is!”

  The dog had to be enormous to be noticed from that far away. Was it really as big as a house? Dan wasn’t sure. It was plenty big enough—he was sure of that. Some Westside soldiers ran forward with it, to guide it toward the Valley men. Then, as it saw them or smelled them or did whatever it did to know they were there, it ran on by itself. They just wore uniforms, while it had on armor like a cavalry charger’s. It easily outdistanced them even so.

  Dan reached back over his shoulder for an arrow. A heartbeat later, he started to laugh at himself. As if an arrow would do anything to a creature like that even if by some accident it hit! He wanted to run. The fearsome Westside dog could bite him in half with one chomp.

  A couple of Valley soldiers did run. Their sergeants swore at them, which didn’t make them stop. They’d get in trouble later on. They had to think that was better than getting eaten right now.

  Then Dan heard a sharp, repeated hammering noise: bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! The reports were bigger and louder than any he’d ever heard from an Old Time rifle. He looked around. The machine-gun crew had got their weapon down from the pack horse. They were banging away at the Westside monster dog as if their lives depended on it—and they did.

  The dog-monster’s growls changed to yelps of agony. The beast’s armor would have turned arrows, maybe even musket balls. Dan didn’t know about ordinary Old Time rifle bullets. He did know the armor had zero chance against the enormous slugs the .50-caliber machine gun spat.

  In spite of its wounds, the dog was brave. It kept coming up Sepulveda till it couldn’t move any more. It didn’t finally go down till it got within a couple of hundred yards of the Valley soldiers. By then, Dan could clearly see the holes the bullets had chewed in its armor, and the blood that poured from the holes in the animal’s hide. His stomach wanted to turn over—it wasn’t pretty.

  That cannon up near the mouth of the tunnel boomed once more. The big iron ball it fired clanged off a boulder not far from the machine gun and crazily ricocheted away. One of the men in the gun crew had some Old Time field glasses. He peered through them, then pointed. The machine gun started bangi
ng again.

  Dan had no field glasses. Some of the machine-gun rounds were tracers, though. He could see where they went. The red flashes of fire led his eye straight to the cannon. The Old Time machine gun had at least as much range as the modern artillery piece. One after another, the men serving the cannon fell.

  When the machine gun stopped shooting, some of the Westside artillerymen stood up. Replacements ran forward to help them fire the gun. The Valley machine gunner with the binoculars was waiting for that. As soon as the enemy gun crew was complete again, the machine gun roared back to life. More Westsiders went down. Dan didn’t think they would rise till Judgment Day.

  “Let’s go!” Captain Kevin yelled. “They won’t give us any trouble now!”

  Cheering, the Valley men ran forward. Dan charged past the enormous dog’s corpse. Blood puddled underneath it. Flies buzzed up in annoyance as the soldiers went past. They’d already started feeding on the body.

  A few shots rang out from the Westsiders. They must have counted on the dog and the cannon to hold back the Valley troops. Now that that wasn’t working, they didn’t seem to have another plan. The pitiless machine gun picked off their men at a range from which they couldn’t answer.

  Some of the Valley soldiers started climbing up to the 405. Dan was one of them. What he saw when he got up there made him whoop and stomp his feet. The Valley men had outflanked the wall, which didn’t stretch all the way across the pass. And the Westsiders were running as fast as they could.

  Three

  Sound really carried here. That was one of the first things Liz had noticed about this alternate. It had much less background noise than the home timeline did. No streets and freeways full of cars here. No TVs. No radios. Only a handful of windup record players. No factories, not really.

  And so, when the fighting in the Sepulveda Pass got going, Liz and her family could try to figure out what was going on from what they heard. So could everybody else in Westwood.