The Rackham Files (23 page)

All the smoke over Oakland seemed drawn toward Alameda; in fact, sucked toward the broad foot of the smoke column we'd been taught to call a mushroom cloud. But this mushroom had a ring around it and several heads, the top one so unimaginably high that it seemed nearly above me. The mind-numbing quantity of energy released by that airburst had heated every square inch below it so that the very earth, like incandescent lava, heated the surrounding air and triggered leviathan updrafts that fed the stem of the cloud. I was watching a city consumed by fire, the updrafts creating winds that howled across skeletal buildings and fed flames that would rage until nothing burnable remained.

Nothing could live in or under that hellish heat unless far down in some airtight subbasement. Even after everything on the surface was consumed, the heat, baking down into the earth below fried macadam, would linger for many hours to slowly cook the juices from any organic tissue that might have somehow survived the first hour of firestorm. In a few hours there would not be a child—a tree root—an amoeba—living within miles of ground zero.

Far to the south another deadly column climbed through the stratosphere. Its shape was different, its pedestal and ring of smoke broader, with one well-defined globular head that was beginning to topple, so it seemed, eastward, blown by prevailing high-altitude winds. I wondered if any USAF personnel had bunkers in Sunnyvale deep enough to live through that ground-level wallop. The firestorm raging into San Jose was too distant for me to see flames, but the smoke suggested low-level winds blowing east to west toward Sunnyvale.

Nearer to me, some traffic moved, but for the most part the arterials were simply clotted into stagnation. A faint boom, horn bleats, and beneath it a soft whispering rumble told me of a million lethal scenes being played out below me against a backdrop of Armageddon. A pair of bikes
braapped
past me fifty yards off, and a dozen hikers labored up the slopes, reminding me of a crowd straggling away from the site of some vast sporting event after the fun was all over.

Short stretches of Morgan Road were visible from a promontory some distance away, and I turned to get my stubby 7-by-50 monocular from the glove box only to see a man in a half-crouch trading eye contact with Spot. He hadn't seen me. The man wore a business suit and expensive shoes and he was motionless except for his right hand, which was drawing a medium-caliber automatic, very slowly, from a hip pocket.

"I wouldn't," I said. He jerked his head around, saw me holding my little .38 in approved two-handed police stance, and wisely decided that he wouldn't, either. "Just put it back in your pocket, Jasper, and don't look back. I don't want to kill you—but I don't much want
not
to at the moment."

The handgun disappeared. He tried to smile but his sweat-streaked face wanted to cry instead. "Lotus and cheetah," he enumerated, licking dust-caked lips. "I know you. Can't recall the name, but word gets around. My name's Hollinger; I'm an attorney." And I will be damned if he didn't two-finger a little embossed card from his vest!

I ignored it, watching his hands as I moved to the car and fumbled for my gadgetry. "I haven't time to chat and neither do you, Mr. Hollinger." I waved him away with the revolver as I came up with the monocular, not wanting him near while I peered through it.

"Look, my car's two miles back, on the shoulder. No fuel. Cadillac. I'll sign it over to you for a lift to Santa Rosa."

I chuckled. "Tried to sandbag us, and now you want to plea-bargain. You're a lawyer, all right." I motioned him away.

He wasn't used to summary judgments. "The emerald in this ring is worth five big ones, buddy. It's yours for a lift. You won't get many offers this good."

"In two weeks there may be emeralds available for anybody who likes 'em. God Almighty couldn't get you to Santa Rosa right now; you waited too long. Put the fucking ring in your pocket, stay off the fire lanes, and look for shelter in Antioch." He crossed his arms, threw his head back, and inhaled. "Or I can put you out of your misery right now because you're starting to bug me," I finished, thumbing the hammer.

He turned and ran; limping, cursing, and sobbing, ignoring my free advice. I scratched Spot between the ears as I watched the man scramble down, and stuck my convincer away as a fortyish couple approached. They were both rangy, with small scruffy-looking packs, Aussie hats, and high-top hiking boots; and the man saluted me casually as they passed. They didn't seem panicky and their faces were weathered from many a day in the open. They weren't breathing as hard as I was and I was glad for them, hoping they could translate their readiness into long-term survival. If only Shar and Ern had kept up their daily two-mile runs—one of the many fads she'd badgered him into during the past years—I'd have felt more confident about them. Now, they were probably somewhere below me to the southwest, waiting for a road to unclog or pedaling their second-stage vehicles, or maybe lying in a ditch with bullets in their heads while some business-suited opportunist pedaled away with their survival packs.

I knew my kinfolk; they'd all reach me together or not at all. Scanning the road, I saw that something had blocked it in one of the ravines beyond my view, for a solid line of traffic formed a chain that wound for miles to the south, perhaps to Livermore. Nothing larger than a big bike traversed the road nearby, and for every citizen who headed for my ridge, twenty kept to the roadway. I hoped they didn't expect too much when they got to Concord, and hoped I was wrong about that, though I wasn't. Singletons moved faster than groups, a moving panoply of Americana. One old guy trundled a wheeled golf bag along; not, I hoped, stuffed with putters. Most evacuees carried something and most showed that they hadn't given their evacuation much thought until the last possible moment. When I saw the man, woman, and two kids loping along my heart did a samba stumble-beat, but it wasn't my family after all. I guessed they were active in scouting because they walked fifty paces, trotted fifty, then walked again. They were the only group that overtook most singletons.

Maybe, I thought, I should drive along the ridge, stopping to scan the road from time to time; in for a penny, in for a pound. Then I glanced toward the Travis cloud and saw, slightly to the north of west, the enormous dark thunderhead approaching from Hamilton AFB. It loomed higher than the evening cirrus, curling up and toward me from where San Rafael must have been. Its lower half hid behind the flank of the nearby mountain but it was obviously, lethally, a fallout-laden megacloud heading in my direction.

I might be in for a pound, but not for the full ton. I didn't know how long it would take the dust to fall forty thousand feet. Not long enough to let me backtrack to Livermore, for damn sure. Ern had brought me a fax copy of a manual that showed how to build an honest-to-God fallout meter, but I hadn't built the effing thing, and in any case it wasn't enough to know you were frying in radiation. You had to get away from it.

I stepped into the car again, sorrowing for all the people who, walking in the shadowed flank of Mount Diablo, could not see that they were moving straight into another shadow that could banish all their future sunshine forever. I started my engine before I saw the youngster hauling his trail-rigged moped upslope.

"If it's broken, leave it," I called to him.

"Just out of gas," he said with a grin, puffing. His moped was one of the good four-cycle, one-horse jobs that didn't need oil mixed with its fuel.

What I did then shamed me, but at least I didn't con the kid. "See that cloud?" I pointed toward the dull gray enormity curving toward us across the heavens. "Fallout. Those people won't know it until too late, unless you tell 'em."

"Me? Mister, my tongue is just about hanging down into my front wheel spokes." Impudence and good humor: I wanted to hug him.

"If you'll do it, I'll fill that little tank of yours. Get somebody to erect a sign or something. Tell 'em"—I glanced at my watch and swallowed hard—"that fallout will be raining down from San Rafael in a few hours. They must find shelter before then. Deal?"

He nodded. I got my spare coil of fuel hose from the tool compartment. One nice thing about an electric fuel pump is that you can quick-disconnect its output line and slip another hose on, then turn on the car's ignition and let it pump a stream of fuel from your fuel line to someone else's tank. The kid had his tank cap off in seconds and tried to stammer his thanks.

"I'm letting you take chances for me," I admitted. "It could cost you."

"My aunt in Walnut Creek has a deep basement," he replied. "With this refill I can stay on the road and get there in an hour." He was priming his little flitter as I reattached my fuel line. "Is that a real cheetah?"

"Yep, and a good one. I can never catch him cheating."

He laughed and bounced away, refitting his goggles, and didn't look back. Neither did I. If he didn't stop to warn others on the road below me, I didn't want to know. I also did not want to scan the carnage again that stretched across the dying megalopolis. I no longer felt anger; only profound pity for good honest people whose chief transgression lay in thirty years of refusal to prepare for a disaster so monstrous that no government could save them from it. I hadn't felt tears on my cheeks for years, but as I nosed the Lotus downhill toward my place, I decided these didn't count. They were mostly self-pity, in advance, for the loss of my little sis and her family. They were my family, too.

I didn't feel like shooing Spot out to lighten the car's load for another fence-jump. Besides, there was always the chance of a miscalculation, which could snag a tire and throw the Lotus off balance, and I was beginning to consider every screw-up in context of a total moratorium on medical help. So I toggled the automatic gate control. Nothing. Usually at this hour of lengthening shadow—it was past six—I could see distant lights from a few places up and down the road from my place. Not now. The power from Antioch had failed. It was a little late for me to wish I'd installed a wind-powered alternator or even an engine-driven rig. I hadn't.

I unlocked the gate using the manual combination, let Spot in, pushed the damn car through because it was such a chore to get my lardbutt in and out, then relocked the gate, wondering if Ern would recall that combination; wondered if he'd get the chance to. I saw honey-gold hair flying, the girl running to meet me as I scooted for the garage, and thought it was Kate until I remembered Kate's hair was black. Ern wouldn't have to remember any combination because the girl embracing Spot on the shadowed lawn was my niece, Camille!

She gave me a big smack as I left the car. "Scared the heh-heh-
hell
out of us, Uncle Harve," she scolded, starting to sniffle, trying to get an arm all the way across my shoulders as we headed for the root cellar.

"Just taking a look around," I lied as Shar met me on the steps.

I got a quick tearful hug and kiss from my sis, whose dark Rackham hair was tied back from her round, attractively plumpish features. In response Shar had a faint upcurl at one corner of her mouth that tended to make a man check his fly for gaposis. In action she was a doer, an organizer; and I saw that the upcurl was now only part of a thin line. "Ernie and Lance are making a fallout meter in your office," she said and added darkly, "while your cutie-pie tapes around doors and windows upstairs. Harve, I thought you said we wouldn't turn the place into a public shelter."

"So everybody's here, and you've met Kate." I sighed my relief, letting my arms drop, realizing I was already tired and getting hungry. "Sis, we need to bring in everything movable from the garage and smithy storage and stack it in the tunnel."

"Done, thanks to your little flesh," Cammie cracked, and I needed a moment to translate her high-school jargon. She was linking me to Kate.

Before I could protest, Shar put in: "Your friend seemed ready to fight us off until Ernie told her who we were and proved he had your gate combination. That young lady runs a taut ship."

"She's led a rough life," I said and shrugged, then saw the welter of materials where Shar had been working in the root cellar. "What's all this?"

Shar's irritated headshake made her ponytail bounce. Like me, Shar inherited a tendency toward overweight. Unlike me, she had fought it to keep some vestige of a youthful figure, and diets were among her fads. They kept her bod merely on the
zaftig
side but also made her snappish and hyperactive. Now she was both. "I know you kept those outside cellar doors decrepit just for atmosphere," she said, bending in the gloom to choose a strip of plywood. "But they're no seal against fallout. If we intend to use the tunnel, someone has to stretch plastic film over these doors before we tape them shut. As they are now with all those cracks, they're hopeless. Just hopeless," she repeated with a sigh that richly expressed Why Mothers Got Gray.

My root cellar was so crowded with stuff from the garage that there was barely room for my sis to work. Obviously the whole bunch had arrived shortly after I'd left, because they'd done half a day's toting in half an hour. "You'll need light in here," I said in passing.

"You're in the way, Uncle Harve," said Cammie, and I saw that she was perched on her bike at the tunnel mouth. Ern had talked about rigging old-style bike stands, the kind that elevated the rear wheel and swiveled up like a wide rear bumper for riding; but he hadn't built them. Instead someone had taken two of my old folding chairs, put them back to back a foot apart, and strapped wooden sticks between them so that they formed a support frame to elevate the bike's rear wheel. As I stepped aside, Cammie began to pedal and the fist-size headlamp of her bike glowed, then dazzled, illuminating Shar's work. "Sonofabitch," I chortled. "Score one point for cottage industry."

The tiny DC generator on the rear wheel whined quietly, and I noticed that Cammie had removed the red lens from the puny little tail lamp. In the gathering dark of the tunnel, its glow wasn't all that puny. I trotted through the tunnel, every muscle protesting, feeling every ounce of my extra flab.