The Valley-Westside War Page 7

  “You stay here, Jerry,” Chuck told one of the new arrivals. “Guard the door. Don’t let anybody else in.” Jerry didn’t look happy. Chuck slapped him on the back. “Don’t get all bent out of shape, man. We’ll share with you, and you won’t get any less than these guys.” He didn’t say anything about what he would get himself. He was a sergeant, so he was entitled to more. If you didn’t believe it, you just had to ask him.

  But his promise did make Jerry happy—or happier, anyhow. “Okay, Sarge. I guess that’s fair,” he said.

  The trader led the Valley soldiers from the entry hall out into the courtyard. Standing there were a woman about Mendoza’s age and another one who couldn’t have been any older than Dan. “My wife and my daughter, Liz,” Mendoza said carefully. Even more carefully, he added, “They aren’t loot. That’s part of the deal.”

  What could he do about it if Sergeant Chuck decided they were loot? He could get himself killed, that was what. But how much of a ruckus could he (and the women?—they looked uncommonly alert) stir up beforehand? Maybe Chuck decided he didn’t want to find out, because he nodded and said, “Sure. Plunder’s one thing, but that’d be something else.”

  Dan nodded, too, toward Liz. “Hi,” he said. She might not be gorgeous, but she was a long way from ugly.

  “Hello,” she said soberly.

  “You’re not, like, real friendly,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I bet I’d like you better if you weren’t robbing my house.”

  She sounded polite and matter-of-fact, so he couldn’t even get mad at her. She was telling the truth, too. One of the other soldiers had gone into a storeroom. He came out with a big grin on his face, a box in his hand, and a cigar in his mouth. “They’ve got smokes, Sarge!” he exclaimed.

  “Far out!” Chuck said. Tobacco was an expensive luxury. The Valley didn’t grow much, because it needed land and water for crops that didn’t just go up in smoke. But it traded for cigars and pipe tobacco when it could. Old people said the stuff wasn’t good for you, but that didn’t keep a lot of them from smoking. Dan figured other things were more likely to do him in than a cigar every once in a while.

  When the other soldier gave him a handful of them, he stuck one in his mouth and the rest in a front pocket. Chuck had a flint-and-steel lighter. Dan leaned close to get his cigar started. It was a good one, the flavor fine and mild. He blew out a happy cloud of smoke. Then he offered Liz one of the other cigars.

  “No, thank you,” she said, her voice still polite but now with an edge in it. “For one thing, I don’t smoke. For another thing, don’t you feel funny about trying to give me something that’s really mine to begin with?”

  His ears got hot. “I didn’t think of it that way.”

  “I guess not,” she answered. Three words, and she made him feel about three inches tall. Not even his mother could do that.

  When the soldiers found bourbon and brandy, Chuck limited the plunder there to one bottle apiece. “We are not going to get too drunk to do our jobs,” he growled. “We are not—you hear me?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Dan chorused along with the rest of the men. Like most people, he drank beer or wine instead of water when he could get them. He would mix wine with water if he didn’t have enough wine to drink by itself. Drinking water without something in it was asking for the runs.

  But brandy and whiskey were a lot stronger than beer and wine. You had to make a pig of yourself to get drunk from beer or wine. Not with the distilled liquors. No wonder Chuck warned his men to go easy.

  “What other goodies have you got?” the sergeant asked Mendoza.

  With a sigh, the trader said, “I’ll show you my cash box. You’d find it anyway.”

  Chuck shared out the money. He took more than he gave any of the soldiers he led, but not a lot more. He eyed Mendoza. “This is all the bread you’ve got, right?”

  “Of course it is,” the trader answered, deadpan.

  He was lying. Even Dan could see it. But Chuck only laughed. He slapped Mendoza on the back. “You’ve played pretty fair with us. I’m not going to try and squeeze you for whatever you’re holding out.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Mendoza somehow managed to sound sincere and sarcastic at the same time.

  “I’ll even post a guard outside to keep you from getting it twice,” the sergeant went on. “Dan, you take that slot. Anybody else tries to do a number here, send ’em to me.”

  “All right, Sergeant,” Dan said. “But what if it’s an officer?”

  “Send officers to Lieutenant Hank,” Chuck said. “I’ll let him know where it’s at with this place.”

  “Okay.” Dan nodded. He had his orders. He would follow them. And maybe—who could say?—Liz would come out while he was standing watch. That could be interesting, too.

  The shooting was over. They’d got robbed by some of the politest thieves Liz had ever not enjoyed meeting. The Valley soldiers didn’t even try to pretend they weren’t looting. They took what they wanted and acted as if the Mendozas ought to be grateful they didn’t do worse. The devil of it was, Liz knew how many different ways they could have done worse if they’d wanted to.

  “They didn’t hurt us,” Dad said for about the dozenth time. “Thing are just things. We’re all right. That’s the only thing that matters.”

  Would he have said that if he truly depended on making his living from what the Valley soldiers stole? Liz wouldn’t have bet a dollar on it, let alone a benjamin. Playing the role of merchant lent him a certain detachment a real trader wouldn’t have had.

  Mom winked at Liz. “I think the kid outside on guard duty likes you.”

  “Oh, boy. That’s all I need,” Liz said. They trained you not to get involved with people from the alternates where you worked. Being people themselves, men and women from Crosstime Traffic sometimes ignored their training. From everything Liz had heard, those affairs almost always ended badly.

  She wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with even a Westsider. The best of them were dirty and ignorant, racist and sexist and homophobic—by home-timeline standards, anyhow. Those were the standards she had, and she stuck to them.

  And the invaders were bound to be worse. The Westsiders saw them as country cousins, people who weren’t very bright. Besides, they were invaders. Wouldn’t a proper Westsider feel like a traitor for having anything to do with them?

  Liz got her answer to that the first time she went to the market. She saw several Westside girls walking and talking with the occupiers. They hadn’t wasted any time figuring out which side their bread was buttered on. Older Westside women sniffed at them, but not too loud. Liz was reminded of old black-and-white pictures of German soldiers with Parisian girls during World War II.

  She wondered what would happen if Cal and the Westsiders farther south drove the Valley men out of Westwood Village again. How much trouble would these girls be in? Plenty, unless she missed her guess.

  Sergeant Chuck had been right—that cash box wasn’t the only money the Mendozas had. The Valley soldiers hadn’t found the safe, for instance. Even if they had cleaned things out, Dad could get more with the transposition chamber under the house. No wonder he hadn’t worried too much about getting robbed. But if somebody took your life, it was gone forever.

  With some old coins and some new ones, Liz bought coffee—imported up from Mexico—and some green onions. The onions were local. She carried the purchases back to her house.

  The soldier named Dan was doing sentry duty outside. He nodded as she came up. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” she answered. When somebody with a bow and arrows talked to you, you couldn’t very well pretend he wasn’t there.

  “How are you?” Dan asked.

  “I’m all right.” Liz wanted to push past him and go on in, but didn’t have the nerve. Bad things could happen if he decided she was rude. So she asked, “How are you?” too.

  The kid soldier’s face lit up. “I’m fine,” he said. “Is it always cool
like this here?”

  “A lot of the time,” Liz said. Westwood could be ten degrees Celsius cooler than the valley in the summertime. Nobody in America used Celsius in this alternate, though. Some thermometers from Old Time survived, but they were all in Fahrenheit degrees. Liz thought they were dumb. Why 180 degrees between boiling and freezing? Why was freezing thirtytwo degrees and not zero? Because Fahrenheit was a weird man—that was the only answer that occurred to her.

  “Is it colder in the winter, too?” Dan asked.

  “I don’t think so. It doesn’t snow or anything,” Liz said.

  “I saw it snow once,” Dan said. “I was just a little kid. It was like the snowflakes were dancing in the air. It was so pretty. But boy, it was cold!”

  Liz couldn’t remember the last time it had got cold enough to snow on the Westside. She wondered if her parents could. That wasn’t obvious, either. If you lived up in the Valley, you faced weather extremes both ways.

  Nodding as politely as she could, Liz went into the house. She felt Dan’s eyes on her as she closed the door. How much of a nuisance would he be? Or, on the other hand, how hot and bothered about nothing was she getting? If you shot every guy who looked at a girl and tried to talk to her, the world would get empty mighty fast. She understood that.

  But Dan wasn’t just a guy back at high school. He was a soldier in a conquering army. If he got angry at her, he could do things a guy at high school never dreamt of. After a moment, Liz shook her head. High-school guys probably did dream of things like that. But they could only dream. Dan didn’t have to. He had King Zev’s army behind him, after all.

  King Zev! Liz didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He ruled a kingdom that wouldn’t even be a county supervisor’s district back in the home timeline. (Not that the Westside was, or had been, any bigger.) He was the most petty of petty tyrants—except maybe for whatever was left of the Westside City Council. But his men were here, which was what counted now.

  She brought the coffee and the onions into the kitchen. “Thanks,” her mother said when she set them down. “Any trouble?”

  “Trouble? No, not really,” Liz answered.

  Mom shot her a sharp look. “Something, though. What’s up, Liz? Is that Dan outside the door again?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s not really trouble. Not trouble trouble, anyhow.”

  “I sure hope not,” Mom said. “Do you want to stay inside the rest of the time we’re here? If bad things happen while you’re away from the house, your father and I can’t do much about them till it’s too late.”

  Liz shook her head. “I don’t want to do that. I’m here to learn how to take care of myself in the alternates, right? Hiding like a turtle in its shell is no way to go.”

  “We try not to get stuck in the middle of wars. It doesn’t always work, but we do try,” her mother said. “If the choice is between staying in and getting raped or murdered, you stay in.”

  “Dan’s not like that—or I don’t think so, anyway,” Liz said. “He’s just … interested, you know what I mean? And I’m so not interested in him. He’s a local, and he’s not even a cute local.” She made a face.

  “Cute isn’t always the only thing that matters,” her mother pointed out. “Is he smart? Is he nice?”

  “He’s nice enough, I guess,” Liz said. “Smart? I don’t know. We haven’t talked about anything much more complicated than the weather.” That was literally true. She glanced over at Mom. “Do you think I ought to act friendlier to him? Protective coloration, like some of the girls in the market square?”

  “Not if you really can’t stand him. And I didn’t mean throw yourself at him or anything. There are lots and lots of good reasons why Crosstime Traffic doesn’t want us to get involved with the locals.”

  “I know. I was thinking about that a few minutes ago. These people couldn’t do anything with the crosstime secret even if we handed it to them on a silver tray, though.”

  “Sure, but that’s not the only reason why the rules are there. They keep people from getting hurt, too,” Mom said. “No matter how you slice it, we’re way different from people in the alternates, especially in low-tech ones like this. But if you can be friendly without …” Her mother paused, looking for the right words.

  “Without acting like a floozy?” Liz suggested, acid in her voice.

  Her mother made a face much like the one she’d pulled a moment before, but then nodded. “That’s close enough. If you can, it might make things easier all the way around.”

  “As long as you’re not asking me to be easy,” Liz said.

  “No, no, no. No, even.” Mom made pushing-away motions. “I want you to be able to live with yourself and to live in a world with Dan in it. Both at the same time, if you can.”

  “That’d be good,” Liz said.

  Her mother fed some of the roasted coffee beans into an old-fashioned—and very old—coffee grinder, all brass and wood and glass. In the home timeline, it would have been a fancy antique on a shelf. It still worked for a living here. Mom turned the crank. Freshly ground coffee started to fill the hopper. A wonderful aroma wafted through the air. Liz couldn’t help smiling as she sniffed. What a shame coffee smelled so much better than it tasted! She thought so, anyhow. Her folks guzzled the stuff.

  “Get me a canister, would you?” Mom said, still cranking.

  “Sure.” Liz pulled a small one off the shelf. It was yellow plastic. Most of the decal of a green and red hen still survived to show which side was the front. Liz thought it was ugly. Most people from the home timeline would have. She would have bet that most people from the 1960s would have, too.

  But nobody in this alternate could make plastic any more. Here, the ugly little canister was a symbol of better days. All the locals who saw it exclaimed over it. And it had an airtight lid. It would keep the ground coffee fresh.

  “There we go.” Mom put the coffee in, then made sure the lid was on the way it should be. “Now your father and I can pry our eyes open in the morning.”

  “I wish I could,” Liz said. In the home timeline, she got her caffeine from Cokes and chocolate. Cokes and other sodas survived here only as legends. Once in a blue moon, chocolate came up from the south, but it was much rarer and more expensive than coffee. And, once in a blue moon, a CARE package from the home timeline included real Cokes. Those had to stay—and be drunk—in a concealed basement storeroom. It lay behind reinforced concrete and had a passworded voice lock the locals weren’t likely to figure out. So she mostly stayed decaffeinated in this alternate. When she had to have a jolt, she put up with coffee’s bitterness.

  “I don’t know why you don’t like coffee better,” her mother said. Liz stopped listening. Mom had been telling her that since she was twelve years old and first started trying to drink the nasty brew. What was the point of I don’t know why you? The only answer was, Because I don’t, that’s why. Liz had said it again and again. It didn’t seem to help, because Mom didn’t want to hear it.

  A lot of the time, Dad would be sensible when Mom wasn’t. Not here. He liked coffee, too, and couldn’t see why other people didn’t. Where coffee was concerned, Liz couldn’t win.

  (And sometimes Mom could be sensible where Dad wasn’t. Anything that had to do with boys … Dad wasn’t as bad as some of her friends’ parents, but he wasn’t good, either—not even close. Liz hadn’t said much about Dan to him. She worried what he would do if she did.)

  “It’ll be okay, Liz.” Her mother might have picked her fretting right out of her head. She wondered if somebody’d hooked up a news crawl above her eyes and connected it to her brain while she wasn’t looking.

  “Well, I hope so.” She let it go at that.

  Guard duty in front of the Mendozas’ didn’t last as long as Dan wished it would have. Pretty soon, things in Westwood Village settled down. The Westsiders started getting used to the idea that King Zev’s men were there to stay. And the Valley soldiers stopped carrying off everything that wasn’t nailed down.


  A lot of men went farther south, to hold the Santa Monica Freeway line against any Westside counterattacks. Maybe they’d push past the old freeway themselves. That would be something! Captain Kevin’s company stayed behind in Westwood, though. Somebody had to remind the locals that they’d changed hands.

  One Valley soldier got knocked over the head, and nobody owned up to it. Not long after that, five Westsiders were hanged from lampposts. (A lot of the posts still stood, as they did in the Valley, but their lamps hadn’t shone since the Old Time.) “Next time, it will be ten,” Lieutenant Hank warned. “You can’t play those games with us, not after your soldiers lost.”

  Nobody bushwhacked any more Valley soldiers.

  Dan was glad of that. He didn’t want to walk his patrols always looking over his shoulder, wondering if some Westsider with a brick or a knife was sneaking up behind him. He was starting to realize he didn’t make a great soldier. Oh, he could do the job. But he liked people too well—he didn’t want to hurt anybody. Some of the men in his company seemed to think the Westsiders had it coming just because they were Westsiders. Dan didn’t feel that way.

  Liz, for instance …

  He got assigned to patrol the UCLA campus because he could read a map and wouldn’t get lost. UCLA had a reputation even up in the Valley. It was supposed to be a place where Old Time knowledge still lived. Not everybody liked that—too many people remembered what Old Time knowledge had done to the world.

  But when you thought about cars and planes and light that made nighttime bright as day and medicines that made people healthy all the time and all the other lost marvels, hadn’t there been at least as much good as bad in those days? Dan thought so.

  And then he stopped thinking about stuff that would never be anything but pictures in books with yellowing pages. (Even the pictures were marvelous. He knew what photographs were, but hardly anyone could take them any more.) There was Liz, walking south from the direction of the tall building that looked like a waffle on its side.

  He waved. “Hi! What are you doing here?”