The Rackham Files (27 page)

Around six in the morning my sis roused me. Thanks to the work I chose, when awakened by rough handling I tended to come up with elbow sweeps. Of all those dear to me, only Cammie had intuited that a gentle scalp massage defused the reflex that had soured some relationships with ladies over the years. Shar just squatted near my feet and tugged at my trouser legs until I sat up and said something akin to, "Who 'sit?"

"Shar, bubba; can you take over at the pump?"

With my mental cobwebs torn asunder I reckoned that I could, and asked about the radiation level. She lent me her wristwatch; told me it now took four minutes to get a decent reading, which was roughly one rem on the chart.

As I took the little flashlight and sat down before Ern's pump, I noticed that my plastic film was now taped down the slit where the basement door stood open enough to admit the air pipe. I played the flashbeam up and down the new mod. "Trouble, sis?"

"Huh? Oh; no, Ern did it, thinking we could raise the air pressure in here by a smidgin and gradually flush the foul air out past holes in those
despicable
doors above the root cellar."

"Shouldn't be any holes," I said.

"Maybe; but when you pump, you can see the plastic bulge at the doorway, and Ern says the root-cellar air smelled okay to him just before he waked me. Spot was sniffing around in there a few minutes ago. Would he advance into foul air? Well, you two argue about it later, Harve; I'm simply dead." And she curled up and proved it.

I began the hour by worrying about falling asleep but found enough worries to keep me awake. My back still ached; I resented the fact that Lance weighed almost as much as Kate but couldn't be trusted to man the pump; realized that Spot was freeloading in the same way and worried about justifying his presence. Finally I thought about the frozen horsemeat in Spot's automatic feeder in a corner of the root cellar and realized that all my frozen food upstairs would soon be at room temperature; and how the goddamn, et cetera, hell could we avoid all that spoilage?

For one thing, we could avoid opening a freezer door until the moment we needed something. Maybe tape polyfilm over the opening when we opened it, cut a hand-size slit, and minimize the heat transfer every time we opened that compartment.

Spot's feeder could be manually triggered without opening its horsemeat compartment—and it contained thirty pounds or so of ground dobbin in one-pound discs. The stuff might stay frozen three days if we didn't open the top, and by then we might be ready to eat horsemeat. The feeder's defrost coil, of course, no longer would warm the disc. We'd have to cook it somehow, and Spot could damn well eat farina mix.

He could also stink the place up until we were ready to embrace a fallout cloud, or to shoo him outside, which was obviously the more logical answer. I didn't smell cat shit until, halfway through my stint, I toured the tunnel and got to the root cellar. Like most cats, Spot had fastidious ideas about taking his dumps. In the flashbeam I saw clawmarks where he'd tried to get around the book barrier. But it was intact; he hadn't forced the issue. My nose told me he'd done his doodahs somewhere near instead, and since I hadn't spread linolamat under the cellar shelves, it was still packed dirt.

So why couldn't cheetahs defecate like other cats and cover it up? They don't. They're choosy, yes—but they choose high places.

So voilà, and damn, and cat shit at the back of the top shelf a yard from the ancient timbered ceiling. I scooped it onto a hunk of plastic film, folded the fair-size blivit neatly, and left it nearby.

Back at the pump, doubling the cycle rate to make up for lost time, I thought some more about elimination. Cats weren't the only folks who shat. People who underrate that function as one of life's little pleasures should do without it, and without sex, for a week—and see which one they crave the more. I'd heard that homey observation as a kid and still couldn't fault it. We would have to solve another problem soon.

The best answer was
not
my basement john; it required several gallons of water per flush. My waterbed, the one thing after my tunnel that Shar had praised most as nuclear survival advantage, was as outsize as I was: six feet by seven, eight inches thick. Twenty-eight cubic feet of water was roughly two hundred and thirty gallons.

I reflected on the evenings when we'd sat by my fire upstairs and toyed with the ghastly math of obliteration, comfy and cheerful with our beer and popcorn—Ern's version, corn popped in olive oil and spiced with garlic and oregano. Armed with her texts, my sis knew a lot of disquieting facts. Water, for one: locked in a basement, we might consume nearly a gallon a day each, plus what we cooked with. Plus what we washed in, and that might be a lot. If we needed to decontaminate ourselves after a foray outdoors, we would each use eight or ten gallons per wash. Discounting Spot, the six of us could empty my waterbed in a few days if we weren't careful.

We didn't expect to emerge from the basement in less than a week or so.

There simply wouldn't be enough water for niceties; we would have to skimp. And I hadn't even figured on the water needed to flush the Thomas Crapper. Ern had said once that a portapotty was a simple rig. I hoped he hadn't forgotten his mental blueprint.

Urination was no real problem if we were willing to do it in my basement john, because you can pee endlessly into a toilet bowl and it will maintain its fluid level. But as I roused Kate again to take her place at the pump, I felt a familiar abdominal urge. I denied it and let sleep return, knowing that in a few hours we would have to face a problem in, ah, solid-waste management.

It must've been the shock that woke me, about nine-thirty in the morning; whacked me right through the mattress. I sat up, hearing familiar voices under stress in the near distance, peering through the open basement door toward faint illumination. Kate lay at my side, and I managed to get up without waking her. From what I gathered, Master Lance had innocently made use of my toilet before anybody discussed it with him.

With all my muscles tight from the previous day, I still felt vaguely humanoid. In my lounge area Cammie was setting up a cold breakfast. "The kid didn't know," I called as I shambled my way to the candlelit area. "And it's the day after doomsday, and we're still vertical, team."

Ern came out of my john with a "why me" look, asking if I had felt an earth tremor. He added, "Sharp jolt, not the usual shuddery shakes we get in the Bay Area."

"A quake," Kate said and yawned, standing in the doorway. "Goody, just what we need now."

Shar, after explaining the facts of water conservation to Lance, exited my john and went straight to my coffee table to criticize Cammie's choice of food. "Pineapple juice and stewed tomatoes for breakfast?" She lifted her hands in helplessness.

"That's what Uncle Harve had the most of. I thought these big quart-and-a-half cans would be about right for a meal."

Then the second shock hit, the sonic clap that set crockery and nerves ajangle and, judging from the sound of it, blew out one of my windows. "
Goddamn,
" I said.

Lance, jaw stuck out in defiance, voiced for all of us as he latched his belt: "They better not be atom-bombing us again."

Ern: "Roughly two minutes between ground shock and air shock; thirty miles or so. But in which direction?"

Everybody had frozen in place. Into this still-life Shar said, "If it's south, we may be okay. In any case, we have several hours. The radiation reading in the bathroom is about four rems, but Lord knows what it will be later if that
was
another bomb."

"I suggest we all, uh, tinkle in the john and hold our heavy stuff until we get a portable rig fixed," Ern said as Cammie started toward my john. To me, he said, "We can't keep drawing air from the basement forever, Harve. Got to make a decent filter."

"I don't suppose the Lotus air-intake filter would do."

After a moment, half-listening to Shar arrange a repair party to the upstairs window: "No—but its twelve-volt battery would sure boost the tunnel lights without making us sweat for it. And you just gave me an idea," he added, grabbing up the empty pineapple juice can. "How long would you need to get the battery?"

"Five minutes. It's no biggie, and I know the drill."

"Wear your stream waders, raincoat, hat, gloves, and a scarf to breathe through. Near as I can figure, Harve, there's still a hundred and fifty rems an hour firing away at anybody outside."

I dressed for my mission, dreading it. I would absorb another ten rems in five minutes—maybe less in the garage, if I used the scarf to breathe through and buttoned my rain slicker. The women had already gone upstairs, leaving the trapdoor open so that a gloomy light flooded the basement.

Ern glanced at me at the stairwell. "You're early for Halloween, fella, but that's a great costume."

"Screw you, fumble-fingers," I chortled. In those hip-length rubber waders, with gloves and my wide-brim rain hat as accessories to my slicker, I felt clumsy and absurd; almost as absurd as my brother-in-law, who stood studying a juice can in one hand and a roll of toilet paper in the other.

I stumped upstairs, unsealed the kitchen door, shut it after me, and while crossing the screen porch to the back door, I learned to step lively without scuffing. A thin patina of dust lay on the porch, stuff that had passed through the screen during the night, and I didn't want to breathe it.

The sun's glow on the east ridge fought its way through a grayish yellow haze as I crossed the yard, and I wished I'd dug the tunnel all the way to the garage. A few tiny visible gray flecks drifted down, dislodged from my staunch old sycamores by wisps of breeze, and I tugged the scarf up over my eyes. I had forgotten my sunglasses but could see dimly through the scarf, and I kept an old pair of racing goggles in the Lotus.

Before filching the battery, I tried the Lotus phone, hoping to learn whether we'd been bombed again, feeling sure we had. I couldn't even punch a prefix without a busy signal. Well, what had I expected? In an urban disaster public two-way communication channels are among the surest casualties.

Pliers and screwdrivers are vicious tools, but in ninety seconds I'd used them to wrest the battery terminals loose while trying to identify a putrid odor nearby. I pried the battery up, fearful of the faint dust coat on the car and floor. Then I eased the hood down, lifted the heavy battery, and hurried to get those goggles from the glove box, pausing long enough to pop the glove-box lamp—socket and all—from its niche. Given time, I could've pocketed a dozen twelve-volt bulbs from the car, some with sockets intact.

But I didn't get that time. What I got was a silent thunderclap of emotional shock as I recognized what stood motionless, had stood there while I worked, in a shadowed corner near me.

"You can put the mattock down, son," I managed to say. "Nobody wants to hurt either one of you."

He was a slender seventeen or so, with corn-silk hair falling like a shed roof across his forehead and a wide mouth meant for grinning. His dark windbreaker and jeans were a typical high school uniform; not much protection, yet he was still lively enough to be dangerous. You couldn't say the same for the woman huddled at his feet, draped in a pathetic torn canvas awning. The kid had tucked it around her, unable to find anything in my garage to keep the lethal dust away from himself. "You've gotta help my mom," he croaked, the mattock still on his narrow shoulder.

"We can't do it here," I said, and stared at the mattock. He lowered it in slow suspicion.

"Where, then?"

"In my house," I heard myself say, thrusting aside all the carefully reasoned arguments of an era that had vanished forever under mushroom clouds. "Help me lift her and then take this battery for me."

En route to the house I learned something about masks and goggles; unless they are sealed against your cheeks, goggles quickly fog up when a mask directs your exhalations upward. I had to breathe out through my mouth and still I nearly fell on my ruined back steps, half-blind with my limp burden.

"Only four minutes, Harve," my sis called as she heard us come into the kitchen. "I timed you."

Kate raced down from the second floor, arms loaded with wrapped packs of toilet paper, calling, "I found it, Mr. McKay, in the"—and then she saw the wild eyes of the youth as he pressed himself against the wall, and she gaped at the awning-wrapped woman—"closet, Holy Mary comeseethis," she finished just as loudly. It had the ring of a call to arms.

Kate and the boy regarded each other warily, and I developed a notion that both he and his mother might be so contaminated that, like Rappacini's daughter, their very bodies were poison. Though that was purest fantasy, their clothes might well be a danger.

I made a command decision then, unwrapping the canvas as I said, "Throw this thing outside, kid, then come upstairs," The woman seemed gossamer, very frail in a short housedress and open-toed flat shoes. I took her upstairs as fast as I could, ignoring the outbursts as Shar and Cammie came into view; ignoring also the awful smell of the woman.

The boy—his name was Devon Baird—found us in my upstairs john and was too scared to protest at the sight of his mother being stripped by a clownishly dressed stranger. "You get every stitch off, boy. Toss it in the tub and rinse your hair with water from the toilet tank."

The mother's straight blond hair and breast were streaked with vomit, but the worst was from her diarrhea. I kept my gloves on while sponging Mrs. Baird's sad little bod with a damp towel, propping her up until young Devon stood by, shivering and naked, to help.

He washed her hair out with loving tenderness, talking to her all the while. "We're gonna be all right, mom," he said; and, "It's
my
turn to take care of
you
," and, "These guys have food and water. You'll be okay." His gaze at mine asked whether he was a liar. I didn't want to give him my opinion.

The Baird woman's breathing had been shallow. Momentarily it became stertorous, and then she retched; long trembling dry heaves. What did come forth came from the other end; a thin trickle that soiled the toilet lid. The boy pressed his mother's face to his stomach and beseeched me wordlessly with tear-filled eyes. Maybe my sis had been waiting for something poignant enough to let her accept these strangers gracefully. In any case, she waited no longer but pulled me aside and began to tend the woman.