The Valley-Westside War Page 5

  One particular set of bangs made her father frown. “Somebody’s got a heavy machine gun,” he said. “For a place like this, that’s a very nasty weapon.”

  “It’s a very nasty weapon anywhere,” her mother said.

  “Well, yeah.” Dad nodded. “But we’ve got even worse ones in the home timeline. Here, it’s liable to be king of the hill. King of the pass, I mean.”

  “Do you think it belongs to the Westside or the Valley?” Liz asked.

  “Yes,” Dad said, deadpan.

  “Thanks a lot.” She gave him a dirty look. “Which one, please?”

  “Well, I didn’t see it in Cal’s parade,” her father answered. “If he had one, he would have been proud to show it off, I think.”

  “If the Valley has it …” Liz’s voice trailed away.

  “If the Valley has it, the people here were really dumb to go to war,” Dad said. “Unless their hat has a rabbit in it, too.”

  “Do you think it does?” she asked, adding, “I don’t want anything to happen to UCLA.”

  After some thought, Dad shrugged. “Hon, I just don’t know. If they’ve got more stuff than they were showing, I haven’t heard about it. But I don’t know if I would. I’m just a tradesman, after all. If the big bosses have any brains, they’ll keep secrets from people like me.”

  “If the big bosses had any brains, they would’ve known the Valley’s got a heavy machine gun, right?” Liz said.

  Her father spread his hands. “Can’t argue with you. I wish I could. I’ve never thought King Zev was real smart, but it’s amazing how brilliant you look when you can shoot your enemies and they can’t shoot you back.”

  “Right,” Liz said.

  When she went out into what had been Westwood Village to shop for produce, everything seemed normal enough. People weren’t paying much attention to the bangs and booms coming out of the north—or, if they were, they weren’t letting on.

  Apricots. Peaches. Oranges. Lemons. Avocados. Eggs. Chickens. Live baby pigs. Fish—some smoked, some salted, some you’d buy if it smelled okay. The sellers—mostly women—sat under awnings or Old Time beach umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun. Seeing what amounted to a farmers’ market just south of the UCLA campus made Liz sad.

  In 1967, Westwood Village had probably been the coolest part of L.A., the way Melrose was a generation later. In the home timeline, it got commercial. Then it got grimy. Then it got redeveloped and turned cool again, even if not quite so cool as the first time around. Then the cycle started over.

  In this alternate, time might as well have stopped when the bombs came down. And after it stopped, it might have started running backwards. Without running water to fight them, fires flattened a lot of the shops and restaurants and apartment buildings that had stood in the Village. The buildings here now—the house where she was staying included—were built from rubble and wreckage. The market had sprung up in one of the fire-born open spaces.

  “How much for those avocados?” Liz asked an old lady in a broad-brimmed straw hat—not quite a sombrero, but close.

  “Dime apiece,” she answered. “Three for a quarter.”

  Liz had all she could do not to giggle. Old Time money still circulated here. So did newer coins on the same standard. Prices were ridiculously cheap, at least by the home timeline’s standards. Liz had had to learn about pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters before she came here. In the home timeline, a dollar—the smallest coin around—wouldn’t come close to buying what a penny bought here. And a benjamin—a hundred dollars—was worth somewhere between a dime and a quarter.

  No matter how cheap things seemed, you couldn’t take the first offer. That was an insult. “I’ll give you a quarter for five,” Liz said. “They aren’t very big.” She’d had to practice sounding that snotty.

  The old lady let out a squawk. She told Liz what a snippy, rude thing she was. All this was as formal as a dance. They settled on four avocados for twenty-five cents, the way they’d both known they would. But social rules had to be followed even when they made no sense—maybe especially when they made no sense.

  More bangs and booms came from the north. “Are those getting closer?” Liz asked. That wasn’t in the rules about haggling, but it was liable to be more important.

  After cocking her head to one side to listen, the avocado seller said, “I sure hope not. That would be a stone bummer.”

  “Yeah, wouldn’t it?” Liz said. She wasn’t sure, but she did think the noises from the north were louder than they had been. Maybe that was just her jumpy imagination talking. She could hope it was, anyhow.

  Carrying the avocados in a cloth sack, she wandered through the market looking for a chicken to buy. Meat here didn’t come neatly packaged in a refrigerated case at the store. If you wanted chicken stew, you bought a live chicken and whacked off its head with a hatchet. Then, after it stopped spewing blood and thrashing—which could take much longer than Liz would have imagined before she watched the first time—you had to pluck it and clean it. Cleaning it was a polite way to say cutting it open and taking out the guts and the lungs and whatever else you didn’t want to eat.

  The first time Liz helped do that, she got sick. She could handle it now, but it didn’t thrill her—not even close. So she dawdled instead of buying a bird right away. Carrying one back to the house by its feet while it clucked and squawked wasn’t much fun, either.

  Hoofbeats drummed up the road from the west. That was more interesting than looking at one more beady-eyed chicken, so Liz turned to see what was going on. A mounted soldier galloped his horse toward the market. Liz had seen the look on his face before, back in the home timeline. People who’d just been in a traffic accident had that same air of stunned disbelief.

  “What’s happening, man?” somebody called.

  “They beat us.” The soldier’s voice was eerily calm, the way those of accident survivors often were. “They beat us,” he repeated, as if he’d forgotten he’d said the same thing a moment earlier. “They rolled us up. That stinking machine gun of theirs …” He shuddered. “They’re coming. We’ll try to stop them, but they’re coming.”

  Before anyone could ask him more questions, he rode on. He left chaos in his wake. Men groaned. Women screamed and wailed. Some of the buyers and sellers decided they didn’t want to hang around any more. Several of them looked to the north as if they expected a million Valley soldiers to follow hard on the horseman’s heels.

  That didn’t happen, of course. Little by little, the ones who stayed realized it wouldn’t. But by the time Liz bought a meanlooking chicken (so she wouldn’t mind so much when the bird got it in the neck), several more Westside soldiers made it back from the fighting in the pass. Some rode horses. Others were on bicycles with the wooden tires they used here instead of rubber.

  They all told the same story, near enough. They would have easily beaten the men from the Valley if not for that machine gun. With it, King Zev’s soldiers could do no wrong. “They could kill us from ranges where we couldn’t even touch them,” said a man on a bike. “How are you supposed to fight a war like that?”

  “Why didn’t Cal know they had it?” somebody asked.

  “Beats me,” the soldier answered. “He didn’t, though—never in a million years.” He paused, then added one more telling detail: “Pots is dead. That gun chewed up his armor like it wasn’t there. Chewed him up, too.”

  People moaned and wept when they heard that. The monster mutant dog had been a symbol of Westside strength for years. What did he symbolize now? The collapse of Westside strength? It sure looked that way to Liz.

  Sack of avocados in one hand, chicken legs in the other, her head full of news, she headed back toward the house. She was glad to give her mother the chicken. She wasn’t so glad to pass the news along.

  Mom’s mouth tightened. “I was afraid of that. Remember how your father said a heavy machine gun would be big trouble?”

  “Well, he was right.” Liz didn’
t say that every day. She got on well with her father, but she didn’t always agree with him—not even close. She paused, gulped, and asked, “What do we do if … if the Valley soldiers come here?”

  “Try to stay out of their way,” her mother answered. “Try not to make them notice us. Try not to get in trouble. Try to protect UCLA, if we can.”

  “How do we do that if we’re doing all those other things, too?” Liz asked. This time, Mom didn’t answer. Liz wondered why. She thought it was a mighty good question.

  Dan was over the top of Sepulveda Pass. The wall the Westsiders had run up—the wall that had started the war—lay behind him. Prisoners the Valley troops had taken were already starting to knock it down.

  “All downhill from here!” Captain Kevin shouted. The men in his company cheered.

  The captain meant it both literally and figuratively. Dan figured the fight would get easier from here on out, too. And it was downhill from here, all the way into Westwood and Brentwood, the Westsiders’ most important northern centers.

  Not all the enemy soldiers had given up and run away. Somebody fired a musket from behind a boulder. A cloud of black-powder smoke told where he hid. The bullet hit the asphalt maybe twenty feet from Dan and ricocheted away.

  “Shall we hunt him down, sir?” Sergeant Chuck asked.

  Captain Kevin shook his head. “No. It would only waste our time, and that’s what he wants. Spread the men out so they’re harder to hit, that’s all. Once we finish taking the Westside apart, this guy will have to surrender, too.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. Dan didn’t think he liked the order, but he obeyed it. Before long, the musketeer fired again. He missed again, too. A musket would shoot farther than a bow, but it was less accurate. If he’d had an Old Time rifle, now … But he didn’t, and Dan was glad he didn’t.

  Before long, the Valley men came to another barricade across the 405. This one was made of rubble, and plainly brand new. Some Westside soldiers crouched behind it, aiming to stop the troops from the Valley—or, more likely, to delay them, anyhow. A couple of the Westsiders did have Old Time weapons. They opened up too soon, though, and warned the Valley men. Dan and his comrades scrambled off the freeway into the brush to either side. If they had to work their way past the men with the dangerous weapons, then they did, that was all.

  And then the machine gun started hammering at the Westsiders again. With that gun reaching for you, you had to be crazy, or at least crazy-brave, to expose yourself to the death it spat.

  Some of them were. They held their ground and tried to shoot back. But the machine gun was too much for most of them to face. Some of its bullets even punched through the junk they’d piled up to protect themselves. So was it any wonder that a lot of them ran away to fight somewhere else another time—or maybe just to save their own lives?

  Wonder or not, one of the Westsiders dashed past Dan without knowing or caring that he was close by. The enemy soldier couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than he was himself. Dan set an arrow on his bowstring, drew, and let fly all in one smooth motion. The string scraped across his leather wristguard.

  The arrow caught the Westsider in his right calf. He went down with a wail. Dan had aimed at his chest. Still, a hit was a hit. Drawing his shortsword, Dan ran forward. “Surrender!” he yelled. “You’re my prisoner!”

  “It hurts!” the Westsider said. “It hurts!” He hardly even knew Dan was there. Pain twisted his face. Blood ran from the wound—Dan could smell it as well as seeing it. All at once, gulping, he was less proud of what he’d done.

  “You give up?” Dan said roughly, and then, “You better give up. You reach for that musket, it’s the last dumb thing you’ll ever do.”

  “It hurts!” the Westsider wailed again. After that, he blinked and seemed to realize he had company. He looked from Dan to the musket he’d dropped. “Stupid thing isn’t loaded anyway.”

  He could say that, which didn’t make it true. “Do you surrender?” Dan demanded. “This is your last chance.” That sounded tough, but what would he do if the Westsider said no? Kill him in cold blood? He wasn’t sure he could.

  He didn’t have to find out, because the Westsider answered, “Yeah, I surrender. What else can I do? Will you put a bandage on my leg?”

  “Sure,” Dan said. “Want me to push the arrow through first? Otherwise, the surgeon will have to cut for it, and I don’t think we’ve got ether for prisoners.”

  “Oh, wow.” The captured enemy sounded bleak. Dan would have, too, were it his leg. Only luck that it wasn’t, luck and a heavy machine gun. If one of those slugs had hit this guy, he wouldn’t be freaking out about a nice clean wound. He’d likely be dead. Dan had gone past some Westsiders who’d stopped .50-caliber rounds. Even if the bullet didn’t hit a vital spot, the shock of getting smacked by something moving that fast could kill.

  “Well, do you?” Dan asked when the Westsider didn’t give him a straight answer.

  “Yeah, go ahead.” The other youngster set himself.

  But before Dan could, Sergeant Chuck said, “Come on, kid—get moving. Throw his musket some place where he can’t grab it, and get yourself in gear. He won’t be your personal slave, even if you did shoot him. You’re here to fight. We’ve got other people to clean up the mess afterwards.”

  “Okay, Sarge.” Dan wasn’t sorry to have an excuse to get to his feet. He knew what you were supposed to do about an arrow wound, but he’d never tried it before. He didn’t much want to, either. Hurting somebody on purpose, even if you were helping at the same time, seemed harder than shooting at the same person had been. That was crazy, but it was true. He nodded to the Westsider. “Uh, good luck.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” the wounded soldier said. Dan grabbed the musket and flung it into the brush. The Westsider wasn’t likely to go after it.

  “Let’s move.” Chuck gave Dan a shove. Dan got moving. The sergeant asked, “First one you shot?”

  “First one I know I did, anyway,” Dan answered.

  “Yeah, sometimes you can’t tell,” Chuck agreed. “How do you feel about it?”

  Dan wanted to brag about how heroic he was. He found that the words wouldn’t come out of his mouth. What did come out was, “I almost barfed.” He waited for the tough sergeant to laugh at him.

  But Chuck only nodded. “Well, that’s honest,” he said. “I felt the same way the first time I did it. People who aren’t soldiers think war’s a game. The ones who have to fight know better.”

  “Some soldiers brag about what they do,” Dan said.

  “Most of the ones who brag haven’t really done it,” Chuck replied. “Some of the others …” His mouth tightened. “Well, some people get off on hurting others. They’re good killers. They usually aren’t good soldiers. There’s a difference.”

  “I guess.” Dan hadn’t really thought about that before.

  A few hundred yards ahead, some Westsiders were making another stand. They couldn’t hope to stop the Valley army now—or they were flipping out if they thought they could. But they could slow down the advance through the pass. That would let more of their own men get away.

  “Come on! Come on!” Captain Kevin shouted. “We have to outflank them. They’ll be sorry they tried to mess with us then. They—” He broke off with a howl of pain, clutching at his right upper arm.

  “The captain’s hit!” Chuck shouted. He and Dan weren’t especially near the wounded Valley officer.

  One of Kevin’s lieutenants spoke up: “We have to go on! Our medics will see to the captain!” That deep voice had to belong to Hank. He made a pretty good number two man. Dan had never thought of him as a commander, but now he had the chance to show what he could do.

  For the moment, he did what Captain Kevin had been on the point of doing. He led the Valley men around the makeshift scrape of earth and rubble the enemy had thrown up. He didn’t wait for the heavy machine gun to make the Westsiders keep their heads down. Instead, he used riflemen a
nd musketeers for the same job. They did what needed doing, too. There weren’t that many defenders, which helped.

  When the Westside soldiers saw the Valley men were starting to slip around behind them, they fled. Dan shot at one of them. He wasn’t too disappointed when his arrow missed. He did think he aimed honestly—he didn’t want to let his kingdom down or anything. But he still wasn’t sorry not to be responsible for hurting somebody else.

  Some of the other Valley men were hurting the Westsiders. Dan watched a man go down, clutching at his side. A Valley soldier ran over to him, picked up a loose chunk of asphalt, and bashed in his head. “For the captain!” the Valley man yelled. He kicked the Westsider—who had to be dead after that—and ran on.

  If they’d won, they would have done the same thing to us, Dan thought. He knew that was true. The Westsiders wouldn’t have turned Cal’s huge, horrible dog loose on anybody they loved. Even so, seeing what war was all about and what it did to people didn’t make him happy.

  Then a bullet cracked past his head. It came so close that he felt, or thought he felt, the wind of its passage. While he was being sorry war was so savage, somebody on the other side was doing his level best to kill him. And the enemy soldier’s level best was almost good enough.

  If the Westsiders were going to fight, how could he do anything else? He saw no way. They were probably asking themselves the same question about King Zev’s troops, but Dan couldn’t do anything about that.

  He’d been fighting and scrambling forward all day long. Even so, he realized, he wasn’t nearly so hot and sweaty as he would have been back home. People said the weather on the Westside was cooler than it was in the Valley. They talked about the sea breeze. Dan had never seen the sea. He knew it was there, but he’d never gone down Topanga to see it. That was an all-day journey. A lot of the time, what people said was a bunch of bull. Here, though, it looked as if those people—whoever they were—knew what they were talking about. It really was cooler once you started coming down the south side of Sepulveda Pass.