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II. Doomsday Plus One 

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.

I said to the boy, perhaps too gruffly, "Have you been sick like this, too?"

He hesitated, started a negative headshake, swallowed hard, glanced away.

"You have to be strong, and truthful, if we're going to help you," my sis said. It had a threat in it. I wished she'd always been this firm with Lancey-pants.

Mumbling, he said, "She made me wear that damn awning in the culvert while she went to find a better place in the middle of the night and wouldn't let me give it to her until we got over your fence about dawn and then she started puking and—and all. I barfed a little just before you found us. I think it was her being sick that made me sick."

Shar said she hoped he was right and asked why the devil I was still wearing contaminated clothes. While I took my scare costume off in an upstairs bedroom, Shar got the fallout meter and set it between Mrs. Baird's thighs while Devon murmured hopeful things and answered Shar's questions. It seems that Mrs. Baird, a divorcee wary of adult male help, had been panicked by a radio warning at roughly ten the night before; had driven wildly from Concord without the least idea where she was taking her son. She simply took the road of least resistance away from the debris of a shattering, flattening blast wave that had freakishly left their apartment whole while sending storefronts screaming like buzz saws through crowded streets, and through the people composing those crowds. By the time the Bairds drove through it, the massacre of innocents was hours old, and the scenes they passed were silent and dead.

When stopped by a wreck, they had run together up the highway, taking refuge in a culvert for a time. Assuming Ern's estimate was close, she must've taken nearly two thousand rems during those first few hours when the fallout was at its most lethal level, showering its gamma radiation in all directions. Devon's dose might have been survivable as he cowered in that culvert, but Shar's single glance at me endorsed my thoughts about the woman; we were in the presence of death momentarily deferred.

"Her reading is about ten rems per hour," my sis said as I handed an old bathrobe to the youth. "That's about the same as it is everywhere on this floor, maybe a bit more—maybe because of all that," she indicated the pile of clothing in the bathtub. "Let's get her to the basement, Harve, and make her—better." We both knew that was a white lie. We could only try to make her comfortable. But Devon perked up a bit, stumbling along in a robe that swallowed his thin frame. Later Shar presented Devon with her old jeans and sweater from my guest bedroom.

Ern, feverishly slashing precise cuts in cardboard boxes he had pirated from the root cellar, stared in glum silence as we made a pallet for Mrs. Baird near my waterbed. The boy hurriedly visited the john and from the sound of it was trying to muffle his dry heaves. Kate had stashed containers of water in the tub, and I figured Devon knew enough to use it as necessary.

I told Ern how I'd found the pair; watched him work, mystified at the juice tins Lance had emptied into my old stewpot. My nephew was now modifying them in accord with the one Ern had made.

Ern made no complaint about the foundlings, no reproof for my weak-minded decision to take charity cases I had sworn not to take. He chose another topic. "I hope you got the battery. It's going to get damn tiresome in the dark when those dry cells run down, 'cause we can't afford to keep somebody pedaling a bike all the time. Uses too much oxygen; gives off too much water vapor and carbon dioxide."

Cammie was making a tinned beef sandwich for Devon. I asked, "Cammie, will you bring that battery down from the kitchen?"

My niece stopped assembling the sandwich, glanced at her dad, made no move to comply until he gave her the slightest of nods in the basement gloom. I dug the glove-box lamp from my pocket and gave it to Ern, who recognized its utility without a word being spoken. And then I sat down with Lance and mimicked the things he was doing with juice cans. I had some thinking to do.

This was my place. If I chose to get sticky about it, they were all guests subject to my rules. As I'd warned Kate, democracy couldn't reign unchecked when our lives depended on everyone taking some direction. If I made the rules, couldn't I break them?

Well, I had; first with Kate and now by ushering this desperately sick woman and her teenage son into my shelter after agreeing with Ern and Shar that extra people would overcrowd our "lifeboat." Now I sensed that my kinfolk were realigning their ideas about my leadership. That worried me. Was I or wasn't I the one who ran things in my own home?

I compared my work with Lance's and punched holes in the next juice can more like his. Then I realized I was actually letting a spoiled kid show me what to do. I didn't like that one damn bit.

However, Lance was working in accord with our recognized expert: Ern. I could choose to do things differently for the sheer pleasure of self-determination, or I could do them the right way. Seen in this light, my urge for control looked pretty silly. Any leader who leads primarily for the joy of wielding power is a leader ripe for overthrow, especially if he makes too many bad decisions. I couldn't fault that logic. It had brought about the Magna Carta and the Continental Congresses and the Russian revolution and goddamn if I wasn't denying my own right to run things in my own castle, so to speak.

Had I made a bad decision, bringing the hapless Bairds in? I knew Shar thought so; suspected the others felt the same way. Yet no one had overtly challenged me for it. Maybe they were giving me another chance—or enough rope. And maybe Ern's mystifying work with toilet paper and tin cans would prove faulty, too, but he had a good track record. The least I could do was give him the freedom to keep improvising, even if that meant my temporarily becoming a peon on his tiny assembly line.

In this way I discovered a rationale of leadership that we seemed to be adopting without endless wrangles about it. I knew where things were; had physical strength the others lacked; and in the economic sense we were living in an investment I had made. On the other hand, my brother-in-law brought technical expertise that I lacked, and at this point our survival was chiefly a matter of technology and its applications.

To some extent my sis also knew more of the technology than I did. I'd be suicidally stupid if I failed to let them guide us while we navigated these nuclear shoals. Like it or lump it, I knew I should accept this erosion of my authority, letting it pass to Ern without making a big deal about it. I neglected the fact that Ern was not the authority figure in his household. Shar was:—and she hadn't exercised much authority with Lance.

Kate interrupted my reverie, having taken a sentry position on the second floor. She had used a spatula to pry a few inches of tape loose at several window edges, the better to squint at our horizons without going outside. Anger and dismay filled her voice as she called, "It's another radioactive cloud west of us!"

 

The Golden Gate bomb needed forty-five minutes to thrust its cloud so high that we could see it over nearby ridges. There's been lots of speculation about the warhead, some claiming it was meant for military reservations near the north end of the bridge, and some insisting it was part of a ragged second-strike volley targeted against cities instead of military sites.

We weren't concerned about strategy but about tactics. That cloud was headed our way, and if we were going to survive another day in the tunnel, we would need something better than the air supply in the house. It might've been adequate for two or three people, but with so much activity by a half-dozen of us, our sealed environment was becoming a hazard.

Shar made herself a poncho from polyfilm and a babushka to match, taping it together with Kate's help. She wasted no time explaining when I protested her trip outside. "The girls can tell you, bubba," she said, mimed a kiss, and went outside.

"You and Mr. McKay have taken the most radiation so far," Kate told me, "so she's the logical one." For what, I asked. "To make a slit in the film over the cellar doors and tape a flap of film over it, leaving the bottom of the flap untaped. It makes a one-way air-exit valve, to encourage flow of air through the tunnel. I volunteered but I'm not sure I know the best way to do it. Shar claims it'll only take a minute or two."

I nodded. If that new fallout cloud dumped on us, it would soon be too late for outside work. "Kate, can you use the fallout meter?"

She smiled almost shyly. "Cammie showed me. Should I start taking readings here in the kitchen?"

"Right. Uh—you getting along with everybody?"

An instant's hesitation before, "Everybody that counts."

"Everybody counts, Kate. You mean Lance?"

A nod.

"He's a problem. But Shar's the one who keeps him in line. Just wanted you to know you're not alone."

Leading the way to the basement, she stopped, looked back. "No, I'm not. It's a good feeling, boss."

"Not 'boss.' You know my name, Kate. This is no time to be stressing who's boss; we have enough problems without that."

"I noticed," she murmured, and collected the meter materials. By now someone had cut a swatch of fur from my parka to make the process simpler.

Mrs. Baird had not improved, but Cammie had rigged a bedpan from a biscuit tray. She and Devon hovered over the woman, trying to get her to accept a sip of water.

"Don't try to force-feed anyone who's unconscious," I cautioned. "She could strangle."

"Mom said we need to replace the fluids she's losing," Cammie said. "Her skin is flushed but she's trembling all over, Uncle Harve. I don't know whether to cover her up or sponge her with cool water."

I didn't know either, but one look at Devon's drawn features warned me against saying so. I felt his mother's pulse—quick and shallow—and despite her reddened skin, she didn't seem warm. If anything, her body temperature might be a bit low. I said, "Cover her lightly and keep trying to get her to swallow. There's instant coffee somewhere and I'd say she could use the stimulant. Better if it was warm. Devon, you might nibble on that sandwich whether you want it or not," I finished, spying the food he hadn't touched. I hoped all my guesswork wouldn't do any harm.

Meanwhile I had another job. Ern heard me out and agreed, with a suggestion I hadn't considered. "If you're going to block the chimney flue from the inside, try lightly stuffing a brown paper sack with newspaper and stick a broom head in with it. Then tape the sack's mouth over the broom handle and push like hell. The handle will give you something to pull the plug out with later," he explained.

Kate went to the second-floor fireplace with me and took a fallout reading while I arranged the plug I'd made. I had broken the broom handle off short enough to get it into the fireplace and was kneeling at the hearth when she gasped, "Wait! Isn't some fallout going to get on you when you go poking into that thing?"

I stopped short with a curse, aware that she had saved me from a dose of contamination. "So how else can I do it?"

She hurtled downstairs without answering. I spent the time checking our attic beam repair, which looked good, and came down as Kate unfolded more of my thin poly film. Hers was a sloppy-looking answer to the problem: film taped completely across the hearth opening, so loose and voluminous that I could grasp my handmade plug through the film. "Don't breathe," Kate warned, and stepped back sensibly as I began to stuff the paper plug up past the flue damper.

We could hear a cascade of small particles falling like sand; most of it just harmless crud, no doubt, but Kate rushed to retape the edge of film I pulled loose as a puff of dust emerged near me.

The broom head was too wide and I virtually tore it to pieces in thirty breathless seconds, using the handle like a ramrod. When I felt the plug leap upward inside, I knew it was past the damper into the main chimney shaft, and I simply lit out for the stairs. Kate collected our hardware and followed.

My sis had returned from outside. She shooed Cammie away from a very unpleasant moment while Mrs. Baird threw up pale green fluid into a saucepan. Devon himself wasn't having an easy time because I could hear him retching in the john. At least he had something to throw up, having eaten half a sandwich.

Kate reported that her last reading had been twenty-five rems on the second floor. "And we're soaking up too much radiation here in the basement," Shar replied. "Just because it's gradually dropping, we're acting as if we weren't accumulating more damage to our bodies. But we are, and the sooner we return to the tunnel the better off we'll be. Ernest McKay, that means you!"

Ern sighed and agreed. "I can finish this filter arrangement in the tunnel. Kate, will you take readings under the stairs and then in the tunnel?"

I was collecting the hardware for a string of tunnel lights when Kate revealed her findings. The readings were horrific; twenty in the basement, nearly the same in the tunnel.

Ern paused, thunderstruck, his arms full of cardboard and tin cans. "Good God, we're losing the tunnel advantage!"

Then I mentally flashed on the little meter, abandoned near the fireplace upstairs while Kate helped me minimize the leakage of dust through the film. Grabbing a roll of toilet paper, I moistened a few squares of it and wiped the little meter, taking care to clean its entire outer surface. "Try it now, Kate. You may be reading light contamination on the meter itself."

It was true. Dusted by "hot" particles, the meter had given spurious readings. Now, repeating her readings several times to make absolutely sure, Kate got three rems at the stairs, a half-rem in the tunnel. But the low basement reading didn't slow our retreat back to the tunnel. Shar kept reminding us that every additional rem was one too many. Up to a point, a human body repaired its riddled tissues—but who among us wanted to find that point?

Through all these morning antics Spot had stayed out of the way, but with all of us milling around on our hurried errands, he began to pace the length of the tunnel. A cheetah is a great one for pacing when he can't cut loose and run.

I busied myself collecting parts for the portable john, which Ern had explained to me in one breath: "Make a seat by cutting a big hole through several thicknesses of heavy cardboard, tape them together over the mouth of a plastic trash box, and make a plastic bag to fit inside."

I was astonished to see how much polyfilm we'd used. We had started with a pair of fifty-foot rolls, but now only a little of the ten-mil stuff remained. Of the two-mil film perhaps half the roll was available for toilet baggies or whatever. Those two rolls of polyfilm were among the smartest purchases I ever made.

Then I tripped over a mattress in the dark tunnel and nearly fell on Spot, who marched with feline dignity to the root cellar and sat warily watching Lance. The kid was foraging in the bike kits with my big lamp.

"What're you after, Lance?"

"Getting flashlights for mom," he complained, as if I had accused him of something.

"Good. Don't use the big lamp when a little flash will do," I said as pleasantly as I could while moving away. I didn't hear his reply clearly but my palms itched because it sounded suspiciously like "fuck off" to me. Surely, I reflected, there must be some way to pulp a kid without actually harming him.

The subdued light flooding down the stairwell shed enough illumination for most of our basement operations, but I needed a flashlight to ransack my office for a coil of wire. I asked for a light.

"Coming up," Shar responded, then raised her voice in no-nonsense tones: "Lance, if I don't have a light by the count of ten, you will get no lunch!" I filed that one for future reference; Lance was with us, displaying two fresh flashlights, at the count of nine.

During the next few minutes we lined the tunnel with our stuff and pulled Mrs. Baird into it, pallet and all, before sealing the stairwell door and filing into the tunnel. Devon still had little to say, though he made optimistic noises each time his mother managed to sip cool coffee. I suppose she was, at most, half-conscious.

 

Ern's air filter was a trick he borrowed from oil filtration of an earlier era. During the next hour five of us slaved to get it ready. Ern filled empty juice cans with rolls of toilet paper, plugging off the central tube of each roll and punching holes near the bottom of each can. Then he taped the cans into circular holes in a cardboard box so that, when he connected the bellows pump to the filter box, any air that reached the bellows had to be sucked endwise through the toilet paper rolls from edge to edge. According to Ern, any dust particle that found its way through those layers of paper—between the layers, really—had to be a micron or less in size. So much for the good news.

The bad news was that the bellows had to suck like hell to get any air through a single filter element. That was why Ern used six elements, six rolls in juice cans, for the filter box. He had a second filter box half completed, not knowing how long it might be before the filters became clogged and perhaps heavily contaminated with fallout particles. If one clogged, we'd have another ready.

Before going back into the basement, we discussed the job. Shar felt that she should stay with Mrs. Baird, which left me and Ern as the two most adept at placing that filter box. We needed a fifth hand to hold the flashlight, and Lance and Cammie were the two who had taken the least dosage. Of course we chose Cammie; she could also take meter readings out there.

Kate saw the portajohn I'd been making while we talked and put the plastic trashcan between her knees when I relinquished it. "By the time you're finished with that filter out there, this little throne is going to be very popular," she said with a smile that wouldn't stay on straight.

I showed her my palm and she slapped it lightly, and then I shuffled into the basement to make the filter hookup, wondering if a new Kate Gallo would emerge from all this; and if we would all be changed. If we emerged.

 

The hookup went quickly. First we coupled the air tube we'd already linked to my furnace air intake to the new filter box which had an enclosed front plenum chamber. That way we made sure the filter elements couldn't draw air from the basement. Our next hookup was from the rear plenum chamber of the filter box to the air pipe leading to the pump and took only moments. We secured the connection with tape and went back to the tunnel.

While I sealed up the slit at the tunnel door, Ern was pumping. "Kee-rist but it's hard to pump," he muttered. "Cammie, get a reading on the pump exhaust, will you, hon?"

Me: "An obstruction?"

Ern: "No, I checked that. This damn thing just needs a lot of suction, or a little extra time to get through a cycle."

He was understating it. I could see the air pipe trying its best to collapse until he slowed the cycle rate. I counted sixteen cycles a minute and said, "We have two more people but we're pumping at half-speed, and it's harder work. Ungood, Ern."

Cammie knelt with the meter and flashlight, counting sotto voce, and registered pleasure. "I get less than a rem," she said.

"No more than we were taking last night during the worst," said Ern, still pumping, studying his handiwork. "You know, we really should be keeping a journal on radiation versus time."

Farther down the tunnel Spot kibitzed as Kate and Devon lugged Cammie's propped-up bike nearer to us. A good sign: the youth was fit for light duty, or thought he was.

"Here, dad, let me," said Cammie, and she settled herself at the pump. "Lordy, and me already sore from working this thing last night," she said but kept at it.

Ern mumbled, "We've got to do better than this," and motioned me to follow him to the root cellar. We could talk there without auditors except for Spot, whose coarse doggy shoulder ruff I scratched as Ern plied a flashbeam around us.

As though to himself he said, "Here it is, then: the valve Shar made at this end of the tunnel might improve airflow enough to offset the addition of two more people. Or it might not."

"I'm sorry, Ern. If I'd had more time I might have made a different decision out there."

"I doubt it. And I probably would've done just what you did. I guess I just didn't expect you to suddenly turn soft on the human race."

"It could be in short supply a week from now," I explained.

In determination that bordered on anger he grated, "Well, we aren't gonna go under here, by God! We must build another front plenum for that spare filter box. But we're out of cardboard."

"Why duplicate the one you built?"

"To put twice as many filter elements into the system, which ought to give us almost twice as much air."

I tried to envision it. "You mean put a second filter box out there and draw air from the basement, too?"

"No, no, goddamnit, we need air that we haven't been breathing. The only restriction is through those rolls of ass wipe. We'll just have to run crossover tubes between the front intake plenums and between the collector plenums—uh, on the suction side. Got it?"

"Yup." When Ern started cussing, he was either drunk or exceedingly worried; and he hadn't taken a nip that day. As he leaned against my thin wall paneling in the tunnel, I recalled nailing the stuff up. It was thin panel board with a watertight plastic facing. I tapped the panel behind him and said, "Well, here's our front plenum."

In two minutes we had the big panel loose and had used the back of the filter box to scribe a pattern. Though Ern's Swiss knife even had a small saw blade, we found it quicker to make repeated scribe lines with a sharp blade and then snap the panel along the lines. Soon we were trimming sides of the new part and double-taping the seams to make them airtight. Ern used the saw blade to cut a circular hole for an air pipe. We taped our new intake plenum onto the spare filter box and found ourselves ready.

I hefted the thing, which weighed no more than ten pounds, and said, "I'll tote it."

Ern's chin went down against his chest. Firmly: "No you won't, Harve. It's only a one-man job, and I—I'd rather you weren't out there."

So: open dissension. I misunderstood his motive. "I'm not that klutzy, Ern. And who's going to stop me?"

"Sweet reason, I hope. You and Shar absorbed some heavy stuff outside today. I didn't. Lance can handle a flashlight, and it's time he pulled some weight." Ern's stance was that of a man expecting a backhand, but he planted himself in front of me like a cornerstone waiting for a bulldozer.

Kate disturbed our tableau, moving toward us with the one-holer she and Cammie had finished. It had a taped-together seat of corrugated cardboard over an inch thick, probably in deference to my great arse, and a film-faced cardboard lid with a tape hinge. The lid wasn't airtight, but the film hung down so it could be lightly taped when we weren't using it. Ern's vanwagon had a real chemical toilet, but they had left their first-stage vehicle somewhere en route. Kate's portaprivy would have to serve.

"I'm on the verge of a—ah—breakthrough, fellas. Mind if I test the thing in privacy?"

I grinned at her, stepped aside, handed the unwieldy filter box to Ern, and sighed. "Lance, huh?"

"He's a big help when he wants to be. Don't sell him short."

"Not me, pal." Consumer-protection laws were invented to balk sales of such products as Lance.

But Lance didn't want to. "Why pick on me? Cammie can do it."

"Let him have his breakfast, hon," Shar said. "He's worked very well this morning." Her tone suggested there was nothing more to say.

Ern said something anyway, very softly.

"You wouldn't," said my sis in horror. Lance smiled and slurped pineapple juice. Shar went on. "Ernest McKay, I will not let you bully your own son. Childish bullying, that's all it is," she snorted.

Ern stripped tape from the door slit one-handed, shouldering the filter box. "Coming, Cammie?"

My niece's gaze swept across her mother and brother in silent accusation as she stood up, stretching the muscle kinks from her neck. She took the little flashlight and went into the basement with her father.

I took over at the pump, exchanging stolid glances with my sister. She held my gaze for a long moment and then said to Lance, "Why don't you pedal the bike awhile, hon?"

"Pedals are too far away."

"That hasn't stopped you in the past, lamb. And you do want lunch, don't you?"

"There's more than one kind of bully," he observed. But he went.

In the stillness we could identify sounds of survival: breathing; the clack of pump valves and the whoosh of air; the ratchety whir of the bike as Lance pedaled; the whine of a tiny generator. And muffled by distance, the murmur and industry of a new filter emplacement in our primitive little life-support system. Unheard but very much in my mind was the slow-fire hammer of gamma radiation riddling the flesh of Ern and Cammie.

Then we heard Kate in the root cellar, denouncing Spot as a voyeur. I smiled briefly and said to Shar, "Lance is right, you know."

"My bubba siding with Lance! Will wonders never—"

"Don't 'bubba' me; I'm not siding with him. He said there are various kinds of bullying, and he's right. He's an expert at it, Shar; he just uses you as his weapon and his shield."

"Nonsense. Look at the child, pedaling for dear life."

"Bullshit; pedaling for dear lunch, you mean."

"A much better alternative than beating a child," she sniffed.

I considered that, found it apt so long as it worked, then applied the idea to our whole situation—if we were lucky enough to have one—our future. "Maybe the whole country made a mistake by inventing so many alternatives," I mused. "Lower scores on college entrance exams; middle-class druggies in junior high; professional athletics dominated by minorities. Maybe because the average middle-class kid has too many neat alternatives, a lot of 'em never learn to pitch into a shitty job and get it over with. At worst they can just run away from home and crash at a series of halfway houses. We've let our kids replace self-discipline with alternatives. No goddamn wonder divorce rates are still climbing, sis."

Armed with years of adult-ed jargon, Shar jabbed with a favorite: "Simplistic. Cammie's no druggie and she's on the tennis varsity."

"Yep, and she also got your belt across her bottom when she snotted off. She didn't get pleasant alternatives, as I recall."

Fiercely whispered: "Cammie's not the angel everybody thinks she is. She's subtle; winds you around her finger. When I see that, it makes me want to protect Lance."

I knew Cammie could be a vamp. But she knew how to give freely, even when it interfered with what she wanted. Chuckling in spite of myself, I said, "Cammie has to work to wind us around, and if we like being wound it can't be all bad, sis." Suddenly the pump handle became very much easier to lift, and I figured Ern would be back shortly. "Anyway, think about it. From yesterday forward, for the rest of his life, Lance McKay is going to find himself goddamn short on pleasant alternatives. For his sake, I hope he's not too old to learn discipline."

After a long silence Shar mused, "As far back as I can remember, bubba, you prided yourself on finding alternatives. Nearly drove mother crazy, and got your backside tanned to saddle leather. But you've turned out to be one of those people who have so much self-discipline, except for feeding your face, that you tend to think of yourself as judge, jury, and . . ."

I'm sure she was about to add "executioner." Despite my best efforts, somehow my little sis had learned about the heroin wholesaler, years before. I rousted him in Ensenada and brought him back after he jumped bail. I'd been naive then, and he was such a mannerly dude, and I didn't know about short ice picks in homburgs until it glanced off a rib on its way in while I was negotiating a slow curve on the coast highway. As I saw it, Mr. Mannerly had executed himself.

"Nolo contendere," I said to my sister.

"Cute," she said gently. "What I was getting at is, why aren't you one of the irresponsibles?"

I said it was a fair question and mulled it over as I pumped. Finally I replied, "Maybe because we were farm kids, though we moved to town before you had chores to do, sis. Sure, I love alternatives; they're fun! But feeding those stupid chickens and collecting eggs were things for which there simply were no alternatives on our farm. They wouldn't stop laying on weekends no matter what I told 'em. On a farm you try a lot of alternatives, but you shovel a lot of shit, too. Maybe there's an ideal balance. And maybe that's what I'm trying to steer you toward."

In the dim light her profile and the way she had of lifting one shoulder while she cocked her head took me back many years, to when my little sis consulted me on matters she wouldn't dare bring to mother. Finally she laid a loving hand on my arm. "I'll think on it," she promised. "It certainly won't do to let Lance defy his father in this dreadful cooped-up situation."

At this juncture Kate padded back to announce that the potty had passed her most exacting test. Shar allowed as how she was simply bursting to try it.

"You see," I called as Shar moved away, "indoor plumbing! We've weathered the worst."

Su-u-ure we had . . .

 

Ern and Cammie returned moments after my exchange with Shar, and they were elated when I showed them how easily the pump operated. They drank some juice, and we agreed for Devon's benefit that his mother seemed better. Obviously her system had rid itself of most available moisture, including bile. There was no point in mentioning an IV with saline solution. We couldn't even boil or distill water, much less get it into her veins. All we could do was urge cold instant coffee down her throat when she was able to swallow. That wasn't often, and her gamma-ravaged body refused to keep it long.

Her reddened skin was perhaps the only thing Shar could treat, by sponging her body with saltwater into which a bit of baking soda was stirred. I can't swear it helped much, except that it kept the silent, hollow-eyed Devon from dwelling on his own condition. If he had a chance it lay in his desire to stay active, and we stressed that he must eat and drink plenty.

Shar's purse held a note pad and ball-point pen, which she used to begin a tally of events, beginning with the first ground shock. She started it as a running record of radiation versus time, but it soon grew into a series of anecdotes as well. There was something about the sharing of tales that brought our spirits up and drew Kate and Devon into the group. Not that we were idle. We took turns at the honey bucket and the pump, except for Ern. With extension cords and safety pins for test connections, he was busily embarking on an honest-to-God electric power system.

Why hadn't we used the battery-powered radios on hand? Well, we had. Precious little good it had done us.

During the night we'd thought about radio bulletins only when we were in the tunnel, where FM reception was hopeless. I tried to get San Francisco's KGO on the AM dial but found, instead, good ol' XEROK, Juarez, at that frequency. Even with the outrageous transmitter power of the Mexican station, I could hardly make out when they were transmitting in English; a skyful of energetic particles makes hash of most transmissions. From some unidentified station, I heard what may have been a list of local roads still open, but I couldn't spot the locale.

Shar had tried a radio while taping film over my broken window but had quit in a hurry because, she said, the little they did hear was disturbing to the girls. She had gotten KSRO in Santa Rosa, which warned evacuees that the town could not absorb another soul. She got KDFM in Walnut Creek, which begged hysterically for help from a studio buried so deep in rubble that the announcer could not escape. From San Francisco and Oakland she got nothing. And that was when she quit trying.

I decided to try a third time early in the afternoon, and while using the homemade toilet in the root cellar, I poked a little aerial past our book barrier, hoping to tune in and hear something that would make me feel better. I got Santa Rosa's rebroadcast of an EBS bulletin claiming that the Soviet Union had paid with its life for exceeding the parameters of limited nuclear war. The announcer called on Americans to throw open their doors—those who still had doors—to battered victims escaping from target areas. It tried to cheer us with the news that the President was safe, but in my case I'm afraid it failed there. Finally it insisted that many small towns were responding heroically to hordes of evacuees. The Santa Rosa announcer then broke in and reminded all and sundry that Santa Rosa was not one of those towns. Evacuees from the San Francisco bomb were reminded that the Golden Gate spans were now in the bay. I snapped the radio off then. I'd had enough and went back down the tunnel to my little family, hoping to hear something that would make me feel better.

 

During our first long afternoon in the tunnel, we at last had time to organize and to accept our enforced isolation from the deadly world outside. Shar suggested our rotation schedule for air-pump duties and assembled notes to estimate our individual radiation doses. Meanwhile Ern separated the wires on one end of an extension cord and, drilling pilot holes into the soft metal of my Lotus battery terminals with the awl on his knife, inserted small wood screws as anchors for the bared wire ends. I stapled extension cords for twenty feet along one wall of the tunnel. With spare wire and safety pins, Ern soon had a bike headlamp completing the circuit.

At that point the kids cheered and abandoned Cammie's bike, grateful for a source of light they didn't have to work for. Ern observed dryly, "You kids are lucky; many bike generators are six-volt but these are twelve, so the bulbs are compatible with a car battery." Then he hauled the other two bikes near our cheery little half-amp light and, one by one, stole their generators and headlamps for the tunnel. During all this I heard the McKay family's one-day saga.

Ern had driven to work at Ames that morning, playing a tape album by the twin-piano Paradox duo instead of listening to the radio. The traffic was very light. Small wonder! He had been stunned to find everyone at the shop in a dither over the news reports, and then had tried to telephone Shar. Their line was busy because Shar, by this time, was trying to call him. 

Long ago they'd agreed that Ern would feign illness and return home if hostilities seemed near. He couldn't at first believe things had deteriorated so far, but the model shop at Ames was operating at less than half-strength that morning. Ern kept quiet, stayed near his phone, and swore he would not run for home on the strength of unconfirmed reports of a tussle with Syria.

He had just began checking sensor holes in a specimen wing section when he overheard his manager on video link talking with his wife, who worked in the nearby Satellite Test Center; whatever American citizens might think, Soviet citizens were streaming into firestorm-proof subways in major cities while our spy satellites watched.

Ern knew that STC, spy master of those satellites, would be a primary target if war came. And STC was only a short walk across Moffett Field from the Ames complex. Ern was not fool enough to wait for some official NASA holiday announcement and was jogging to his car moments later.

At home in their suburb north of San Jose, the kids were nearly off to school before Shar caught the first scarifying bulletins about the capsizing of our leviathan Nimitz. Shar called them back, ordered them both into hiking duds, and started trying to contact Ern while she consulted her checklists.

My sis had done everything once: EST, Catholicism, a lover, and a bookkeeping job for a parts supplier in Silicon Gulch. I suspect that each of those activities included a common side effect: a knack for compartmenting and categorizing. In Shar's case it yielded checklists that first became a joke, then a mainstay in the family.

Her crisis-relocation checklist went further than a vacation list. In addition to shutting off the water heater and resetting the thermostat, she included a cleanout of several cabinets that would fill the vanwagon. Ern had the Ford runabout, but their vanwagon, with its cavernous storage space on a sturdy light chassis, squatted in their carport ready to serve as their first-stage booster vehicle. It was roomy enough for boxes of medicine and food, Ern's tool chest, bedrolls, even a pair of bikes and the hand-operated winch that could haul them from a ditch. The other two bikes could fit on racks outside. Each bike had its own wire basket for the individual survival packs Ern had assembled. If they became stymied somehow en route to my place, their plan was to jettison the first-stage (translation: park the vanwagon) and continue using the bikes as second-stage vehicles.

Ern squalled his little Ford into the driveway in time to see Cammie toss the last bedroll into the vanwagon and wasted no time scrounging some extras: shovel, a roll of aircraft-quality tow cable, old bleach bottles he'd filled with drinking water, and the "decorative" blunderbuss from over their mantel.

That funny-looking little period piece had been my gift once upon a time, a purely defensive household item for Shar. A do-it-yourself kit from a gunsmith, it was short stocked, a smoothbore modified from flintlock to percussion cap. Of course it would fire only a single black powder charge and then had to be reloaded. But its bell mouth spread to an inch and a half diameter, and I loaded it with BBs. You needed two adult hands to cock it. You also needed a good grip when you pulled the trigger, because it had a recoil wallop like a baseball bat. Any intruder who was even in the general direction of that bell mouth would find his world suddenly filled with thunder and smoke and steel pellets, and if it didn't blow him into another dimension it would at least give him serious misgivings about wandering into my sis's home without knocking. Nor would folks a block away sleep through it. The blunderbuss was, I thought, just about perfect for one exclusive purpose: point-blank defense within the home. Anyway, Ern stuck it into the vanwagon.

I couldn't help laughing when Lance interrupted his mother's account of the bike argument. "They wouldn't let me bring my bike," he accused, "so I brung the skateboard. Dad thought I was nuts but I wasn't."

Give the little bugger credit—he was good on a urethane-wheeled skateboard and he knew it, and wore his pads into the vanwagon like a gladiator heading for the arena. In a way, he was.

Shar locked their house and fumed while Ern topped off their fuel tank from his Ford, using the electric fuel pump trick he'd shown me. They left the outskirts north of San Jose intending to take freeways to Niles Canyon. It didn't take long to see the futility of that idea.

Traffic on Highway Six-Eighty was already stalled clear back to the off-ramp. Shar folded their local map under her clipboard and directed Ern to a state road, then to a winding county road when their second choice permitted them only a walking pace. They passed under the freeway presently and saw highway patrolmen with bolt cutters nipping a hole in the freeway fence to let cars leave the hopeless logjam up there.

When Ern spotted a pickup running along the sloping ridge of railroad tracks in Fremont, he followed. The right-of-way led them to the little community of Niles, but a highballing freight with hundreds of hangers-on nearly clipped the vanwagon, and Ern decided they'd played on the railroad tracks long enough. They hit Niles Canyon Road then, seeing that traffic toward the distant town of Livermore was bullying its way across all four lanes in escaping the overcrowded bay region.

Of course they saw the wrecks and quickly learned to look away since neither of the adults had special medical training and their first responsibility was to get their own two kids to safety with a minimum of lost time. A few motorists helped others; a delivery truck dragged one car out of the road with a tow cable while other traffic, including Ern, streamed past. Ern didn't stop until forced to, but he was expecting trouble, and when the chain of rear-enders began ahead, he wisely slowed before he had to, gaining ten feet of maneuvering room.

Standing atop the vanwagon, Ern studied the blockage. Two lanes had been stopped for some time after one car, rear-ended, had spun sideways. The other two lanes had continued, drivers in the balked lanes trying vainly to edge into lanes in which cars moved bumper to bumper. No one would give. Someone finally tried to bluff or force his way in, touching off a chain reaction as cars took to the shoulder trying to pass the new obstruction. As Ern watched, two fistfights erupted. One guy with a knife was sent packing by another flailing tire chains. At that point people began simply to abandon their cars in favor of hoofing it.

"I counted fourteen cars between us and the front of the jam," Ern recalled as he snubbed the third bike generator against Cammie's bike wheel in the tunnel. "I figured with enough people helping, we could get all the wrecks pushed onto the shoulder in fifteen minutes, even if we had to winch some of 'em sideways." Ern figured he was an hour or so from my place if they stuck with the vanwagon but longer if they continued by bike. Besides, they'd be abandoning food, hardware, and protection if they left the vanwagon.

Wearing heavy gloves, winch and tow cable in hand, Ern trotted past other drivers, urging them to help instead of just honking. The owner of the first car in the mess stood at bay with a jack handle, threatening to brain the first guy who touched his car unless they'd help him pull his fender away from his blown-out tire. Someone offered him, instead, a ride in another car, and implied that his most likely alternative was a knot on his head from a dozen determined men.

Ern used the man's jack handle as a pry bar under the crumpled edge of the fender, then hooked his tow cable to the handle. With several men hauling at once, they pulled the fender away from the wheel. The owner drove off very slowly while his blown tire disintegrated on its rim, no longer part of the general problem.

One car, abandoned and locked by its owner, was hors de combat simply because the owner had taken his keys. The steering column was locked, so even after smashing a side window, the men couldn't steer the heavy coupe over to the shoulder. Ten men could tip it over on its top to get it out of the way, though, and they did, even while Ern begged them not to. Fuel tanks dribble a lot when a car's wheels are in the air.

The first car to shove its nose past the others was a big sedan, and its driver, a level-headed woman, backed up while others used tire chains as a tow cable from her rear bumper. She pulled two more cars free before charging off down the highway. Ern winched a pair of small cars sideways from the tangle, with help from the owners, anchoring his winch to the base of a steel highway sign. "Played hell with the jack sockets on the cars," Ern said, and grinned, remembering it, "because I had 'em stick their jacks into the chassis sockets to give me something to hook onto." He didn't try that with heavier cars, fearing his winch wouldn't take it.

It took thirty minutes to clear two lanes, and while fifty people struggled to clear other lanes, improvising as they went, Ern sprinted to the vanwagon just as Shar got it started. Soon they overtook the guy riding on his rim. Ern estimated it would've taken the man five minutes to change to his spare, which made that press-on-regardless outlook seem pretty shortsighted.

They left the highway at the outskirts of Livermore, a town experiencing its first-ever taste of terminal traffic constipation. Cammie described it wide-eyed: "Worse than Candlestick Park after a game! You'd see a car go shooting down a side street and then it'd come howling back a few blocks further. People were driving across lawns, pounding on doors, getting stuck in flower beds, you name it."

"Like one of those car movies where they do crazy things," Lance put in. "But in the movies they get away with it." Lance had pegged it nicely; too many citizens imagined they could do the stunts they saw on the screen, and too few realized how much those stunts depended on expertise and hidden preparations.

Once they were across town and headed north toward my place, said Shar, she thought they'd pulled it off. They drove slowly, with frequent horn-toots to warn hikers and bikers who streamed out of Livermore along with many cars. There was some traffic into the town as well, coming down from the hills.

Shortly after the road began its twisting course toward Mount Diablo they saw the other van, a battered relic, its driver approaching with no thought for other traffic but the steady blare of its horn. Ern braked hard. "I didn't think they'd make the turn at the rate they were coming," he said.

They did, but only by taking all the road and forcing a hiker to leap for his life. They didn't make it past Ern, though, sideswiping his left front fender with an impact that threw both vehicles into opposite ditches.

Since all four McKays were harnessed, they sustained nothing worse than the bruise along Ern's muscular forearm. Shar quieted Lance's wails ("I wasn't really scared," he insisted.) and after ascertaining that they weren't injured, Ern found that his door would no longer open. He went out the back of the vanwagon, both kids piling out with him, and then hugged them close in protective reflex. Approaching from the other van was a bruiser in his forties, a semiauto carbine in his hands and murder in his face. Behind him, a younger man limped forward hefting a big crescent wrench.

"Damn fool, didn't you hear me honk? That thing of yours better be drivable," snarled the big one, using his carbine as a deliberate menace.

Ern realized he was being hijacked. "Don't point it at the kids," he pleaded, wondering if either vehicle could be driven. "I'll just get the bikes and—"

"Touch that stuff and you're a dead man," said the bruiser, spying a ten-speed bike in the gloom. "Jimmy, we lucked out."

Jimmy, the younger man, brandished the wrench at Ern, who moved back and started to call a warning to Shar. He never got the chance and in any case he would've been warning the wrong person.

The big man with the carbine stepped up to the vanwagon's open doors and was met in midstride by a thunderous blast. Shar had found the antique fowling piece. The tremendous spread of shot took out a bike spoke, knocked a bedroll out of the cargo area, and snatched the carbine from the man, who cartwheeled end for end. Everyone reeled away from the godawful roar and the smoke that followed like a bomb burst from inside the vanwagon.

Ern looked wildly for something to throw at Jimmy the wrench man but found the wrench available. Yowling, hands in air, young Jimmy raced back to his damaged van and tumbled inside. Shar emerged from the vanwagon coughing and spitting, the little blunderbuss empty but still in her hands.

The big man came to his knees, stared at his arms through torn shirt sleeves. Ern was near enough to see the bluish welts on his hands; raised knots like some disfiguring disease that began to ooze blood as both watched in silent fascination. Then the big fellow saw my sis march into view; saw her cock the harmless thing as if to fire again. He stumbled to his feet then and ran doubled over, holding his arms across his body and crooning with pain. Ern ran a few paces after him until he saw that the man had no intention of retrieving his weapon. Obviously the old van was drivable, because in seconds the ex-rough type was spewing gravel in it.

The vanwagon was another matter. Its radiator torn loose, steering rod hopelessly bent, it could not be navigated another hundred feet, much less the twenty miles to my place. Ern managed to start it and got it far off the macadam while water poured from ruptured hoses. The McKays then traded relieved kisses all around and started rigging for their second-stage flight. It was then half past two in the afternoon.

 

That was about the same time, said Kate Gallo, that she first noticed the burly black-haired gonzo at the racetrack. I let her tell it, making me the heavy in her waggish way. She explained she'd been running from a check-kiting spree and I said nothing to contradict her. But when she tried to describe our open-water crossing as literally floating across, I started to hum "It Ain't Necessarily So" and got my laugh before moving over to help Ern.

He was wiring all three tiny bike generators together, positive to positive and negative to negative. That was when I admitted that Ern McKay had truly found a way to recharge my damn battery! The output of a single generator was too puny to feed a whopping big car battery, but three generators in parallel? Still a trickle-charge, but a significant trickle.

I thought it might be hard work to pedal with three generators riding against a bike wheel but I was wrong. Ern insisted that we connect the generator's positive terminal to that of the battery only while someone was pedaling. If that circuit was intact while no one pedaled, he said, the battery's energy might trickle out through those generators. As it was, we could recharge the battery with about four hours of pedaling and have twelve hours of light without draining the battery at all. I could've kissed him for that. Kate did it for me, squarely on his forehead.

At length Kate reached the point in her tale where I "abandoned" her to search for my family, and I filled them in with a brief account of my trip along the mountain ridge. "If you had any illusions about the flatlanders around the bay pulling through this," I concluded, "forget 'em. The burn cases in Oakland alone would overload burn-unit facilities from coast to coast."

With a glance toward the comatose Mrs. Baird, Shar muttered, "You might try for a bit of optimism."

"I am optimistic, sis. I'm assuming a lot of burn victims will survive the firestorm and fallout long enough to profit from medical treatment. If you've read about the quake and fire in San Francisco back in 1906, you'll recall it was the fire that caused the most casualties. Volunteer crews came from as far as Fresno to help. Trainloads of food and volunteers in, trainloads of refugees out.

"It's not as though there were no precedent for this," I went on, mostly for the benefit of our younger members. "Europeans saw great cities destroyed, whole populations decimated or worse, forty years ago. London, Dresden, Berlin—and don't forget how Japan was plastered. I know it wasn't on such a scale as this, but they did find ways to rebuild."

"It took 'em years," Ern reminded me. "And they had American help."

I nodded. "You're mighty right there, pal. And that's all we can expect, too: American help."

Kate asked in disbelief, "From where? Fresno?"

"No, from us! And millions more like us. Damnit, think! There must be two hundred thousand people schlepping around in Santa Rosa right now, and if the fallout missed 'em they'll probably be outside in shirt sleeves."

"Sure—grubbing for roots," said Cammie. "And I've heard mom talk about the radiation that's spread all over the world now."

"Can't deny that," I said. "We'll probably have higher infant mortality and ten times the cancer we've had in the past. I grant you all that, much as I loathe it. But don't tell me we lack the guts people had in Stalingrad and Texas City and Nagasaki!"

"I wanted to be a golf pro," said young Devon softly. "Looks like I'll be a carpenter or a bricklayer."

Ern: "Could be. Or a cancer researcher. Harve's not promising fun and games, Devon; only hope. We'll all have to bust our butts for a few years, and we have no assurance that we'll ever see things back to normal. Whatever that is," he said and chuckled. "It doesn't take a professor of sociology to predict a sudden change in the American way of life. On the other hand, it might not be so noticeable to farmers in Oregon or a dentist in Napa."

"Oh God," Kate breathed almost inaudibly and quit cycling the air pump.

Cammie asked for us all: "Trouble with the pump?"

Kate took a long shuddering breath, shook her head, began to pump again. "My father has a summer home near Napa. Little acreage just outside of Yountville, which nobody ever heard of. Just a statusy thing. They rarely go there."

"Maybe they're there now," I offered.

Another headshake. "Not them; that's what hurts. You don't know my father. All his clout is in connections with people in the city." No matter where you lived around the bay, when you said "the city" you meant metropolitan San Francisco. "It's just about the only place where he doesn't carry a gun. No, my family will play out their hand right smack in the city."

Of course I'd told them what the Santa Rosa broadcast had said. We knew the approaching fallout was coming from San Francisco itself. Most hands being played out in Baghdad-by-the-Bay were losing hands. It was one thing to reject your family's ways but quite another to envision them all dead in a miles-wide funeral pyre.

"Maybe your folks had a cellar," Cammie said.

Kate brightened. "Wine cellar. Part of the mystique."

"You don't mean those Gallos," Lance said in awe.

"No"—Kate managed a wan smile—"but I could lie about it if you insist."

Ern said he didn't care which Gallo she was if she could produce a bottle of sherry, and that reminded me of the stuff in my liquor cabinet. I said to Shar, "We need to take another reading in the basement for that graph you're making. I'll just nip out and do it and bring back a bottle to celebrate our new electric light plant."

It was around four in the afternoon. Shar consulted her graph and calculated that the outside reading should be around a hundred rems, while the basement should read about two or three—if the fallout cloud had missed us. Five minutes in the basement would be a twelfth of that dosage, which laid only a small fraction of a rem on the meter reader. "It's your hide, bubba," said my sis.

I took the meter hardware and fed several sparks to the meter, then chose a half-empty bottle of brandy and some cream sherry the kids could sip with us. I rummaged and found two decks of cards.

The basement stank like an outhouse. We needed the forty gallons of water in the tunnel for drinking, but my waterbed was available so I sloshed some water from the mattress into a pan and filled the toilet tank in three trips. The damned thing had to be flushed of its barf and never-you-mind.

Then, after nearly four minutes, I checked the meter.

The leaves of foil were completely relaxed together.

Fighting jitters, I charged the meter again and took a one-minute reading. Meanwhile I cursed myself for assuming that the reading wouldn't be off scale in four minutes. I got a one-minute reading of over four rems an hour and hightailed it into the tunnel.

Though abashed by my stupid error, I described it to the others, determined that they could profit by my dumbfuckery. Shar's conclusion was simple and direct; the only smart way to read the meter was to watch it closely for the first minute. If you didn't have a useful reading by that time, ambient radiation was roughly one rem or less.

Her second conclusion was borne out as we took readings in the tunnel. Shortly before I'd gone out to the basement, heavy fallout had begun to irradiate my little place.

* * *

For the next hour the tunnel was a hotbed of projects. I was urged to do nothing that even smacked of exercise because my great bulk would use up twice as much air as, say, Lance—and I'd give off more cee-oh-two and water vapor. So I sat near the little six-watt bike headlamp and took several long readings on the meter.

Shar turned over the sponge-bath chore to Devon and went to use our temporary john. She sprinkled a shotglassful of bleach into the hole after using it, carefully extracted the half-full bag, and placed it into a big brown paper grocery bag. The taped seams of the plastic bag might give way, but it wouldn't come apart with heavy kraft paper around it. She installed the next plastic bag with the paper sack already surrounding it in the plastic trashcan, and I wondered why Ern hadn't thought of that. It is truly amazing how fast we get smart when faced with a dribble of dookey.

Especially somebody else's.

I also understood how farm and ranch people earn their penchant for earthy humor. Dealing with natural functions like evacuation on such a grand scale, you're often faced with side effects that could outrage a saint. But you can always joke about them, robbing them of their power to beat you down. Maybe that explains the rough jokes we shared while in the tunnel.

Ern read my sister's notes and found little to criticize. At a quarter till five we were reading almost exactly two rems per hour in the tunnel, which scared the hell out of us until we found it subsiding soon afterward. We didn't talk about it to the kids, who were fixing a simulacrum of supper and pedaling the bike.

By six o'clock Shar had a radiation-versus-time graph and an estimate of the total dosage for each of us. For Mrs. Baird, who continued her heaves and diarrhea without losing much fluid, Shar simply put a question mark. I knew the answer in total rems had to be in four figures.

Next to Devon Baird's name she wrote four hundred, with another question mark after it. He seemed to be perking up, even insisting on pedaling the bike and pumping air. Best of all, he was retaining food and liquids now. His question mark was the only valid one, but who was so cruel as to tell him that?

I was next on the list with an estimated forty rems because I'd been in the attic and outside, too. Shar and Ern came next with thirty-five; Kate had taken five less. And below Cammie's twenty-five came Lance with twenty or so. Maybe Lance was young enough at eleven to be one of the "very young" who, like the aged, were supposed to be more vulnerable. I tried not to begrudge him the advantage. In any case it was an arguable set of estimates—in Ern's jargon, strictly paper empiricism.

My sis didn't mention lethal doses in front of Devon Baird. Instead she dwelt on the positive side. "In class we studied the Lucky Dragon incident," she said, spooning a portion of tuna and green peas that was not—couldn't possibly be!—half as bad as it sounds. "The entire crew of this Japanese fishing boat was accidentally dosed in 1954; they even ate contaminated food. They took gamma doses of around a hundred and seventy-five rems, and all of them survived it! I think one man died months later from some medication, but the rest made it. And they took much higher doses than we're taking here."

Devon, listlessly: "What if they keep dropping bombs near us every day?"

Ern said, "I can't believe there's much more to shoot at around here."

"I hope not," Devon replied, and dubiously addressed his tuna salad.

Presently we finished our meal, and though Spot made overtures to the leftovers, I steered him firmly to his farina mix. A tally of our food told us we'd have enough for two meals a day through ten days without resorting to horsemeat. By then we might be eating farina mix ourselves. At least we wouldn't have to cook it.

Shar urged Kate to be dealer, referee, and sergeant-at-arms for a card game among the younger members, and as soon as Devon got engrossed in the game, my sis motioned me nearer to Ern, who was seated at the air pump. "Let's talk about what we'll have to do next month," she said loudly enough to be overheard, and then much more softly, "Mrs. Baird seems to have a new problem."

The woman was semiconscious now but never spoke and could barely swallow. Shar had noticed the gradual, steady appearance of clear blisters on the woman's skin. Though some blisters were forming on her torso, they predominated in a sprinkle of raised glossy patches on her lower legs, arms, neck, and face. To Devon's query, Shar had only smiled and said we'd have to wait and see. To Ern and me, she said, "I'm afraid it means severe radiation burns, probably direct skin contact with particles only a few hours from the fireball. The blisters are on all sides of her body, so there's no way we can make her comfortable unless—but I guess the waterbed is out of the question."

"In more ways than one," I admitted. "I hate to bring it up, but while stealing some water from it to flush the toilet, I realized that that water will not be drinkable."

They both gaped at me in the gloom. "But we've only got maybe twenty gallons left in the tunnel, Harve," said Ern. "And about the same in your bathroom. What's wrong with waterbed stuff?"

"The chemicals I put in to prevent algae," I said and sighed. "It's not just bleach, guys. Bleach slowly deteriorates a vinyl mattress, so I used a pint of a commercial chemical. It's poison. I'm sorry."

We fell silent for a time. The kids didn't notice because they were talking louder, making noise for noise's sake. I understood why when I heard the Baird kid's spasms from the root cellar. He was losing his dinner into our jury-rigged john. I'd spent years rooting out soured curds of the milk of human kindness from my system because of the work I'd chosen; yet the quiet courage of this slender kid forced a tightening in my throat. I knew why I hadn't befriended him more: I didn't want to mourn if we lost him. That didn't say much for my courage.

"That poor boy," Shar murmured, "has diarrhea too. I wish we had some plug-you-uptate."

That was our childhood phrase for diarrhea medicine. I said, "Mom used to have a natural remedy. You remember what it was?"

"Well, she started with an enema of salt and baking soda, but that was to replace lost salt and to clean out the microbes. This isn't the same thing. If anything the Bairds probably don't have enough intestinal flora. Anyway, mom also gave us pectin and salty bouillon."

"Why the hell didn't you say so," asked Ern. "We've got a half-dozen bouillon cubes in each bike kit."

I put in, "If it's pectin you need, I doodled around with quince preserves from all those quinces falling off my bushes. There's so much pectin in a quince, you can jell other fruit preserves just by adding diced quince."

"I'd forgotten you make a hobby of food. God knows how I could forget, you great lump of bubba."

"Beat your wife, Ern," I begged.

"Just washed her and can't do a thing with her," he said.

As soon as Devon returned to the card game, Ern took a flashlight and went to find the bouillon cubes. Our carefully nurtured good spirits took a dip when he returned with only one tiny foil-wrapped bouillon cube. "I know I put 'em in," he complained, tossing the single cube to Shar.

Lance saw the gleam of foil. "Dibs," he shouted. "I saw it first, mother!" My nephew's tone suggested that he could be severe on infractions of fair play.

Shar regarded him silently for a moment, knowing as we all did that Lance had retrieved flashlights from the bike kits. Mildly: "Lance, you must've eaten at least fifty already."

In extracting confessions my sis had only to exaggerate the offense to have Lance set her straight. "Fifty? Naw, there was only a few."

"How many do you have left?"

"All of 'em. Right here," he said and patted his belly. In the ensuing quiet his grin began to slide into limbo.

"Aw, he's all right, Miz McKay," Devon said in the boy's support.

The point was that Devon himself was not, and bouillon could have helped him. Inwardly we writhed with an irony that we must not share with Devon. "Thank you, Devon, but I'll decide that. Lance, come here a minute," said Shar.

Mumbled: "Don't wanta."

"Two meals tomorrow, Lance."

He came bearing the word "Bully."

Shar indicated that he should sit between his parents. Then, in tones of muted mildness, my sis composed music for my ears; a menacing sonata, a brilliant bel canto that struck my nephew dumb.

Did Lance recall his father's threat? Shar was ready, even eager now, to endorse it. Lance would touch no food or drink without asking first. He would perform every job we asked without audible or visible complaint. He would use nothing, take nothing, play with nothing unless he got permission first. It was not up to Lance to decide when an infraction might be harmless.

Of course he had an alternative, said Shar with a calm glance toward me. Lance could elect to do as he pleased. He would then be thrashed on his bare butt by parents and his uncle (here I saw the whites of his eyes) and would be bound and gagged if need be for as long as necessary.

"By now, dear, you may have thought of claiming you need to go to the bathroom while tied up. Of course you can. In your pants. Since you have no other clothes and you can't wash the ones you have, you may want to think twice before you do that. But it's up to you, sonny boy," Shar gradually crescendoed.

"Finally, I'm sure you don't really believe what I'm saying. You'll just have to try some little thing to see where the real limits are, just to test us as you always do. Believe me, dear, I can hardly wait. I want you to try some little bitty thing I can interpret as a little bitty test, so I can blister your big bitty bottom after your father and Harve are through warming it up for me.

"I can't tell you how many times I've considered this, Lance. I've wanted to do it, but I didn't want to stunt your development. Now it's time we all stunted the direction it has taken. What you consider a harmless prank might kill someone. Because you didn't know and didn't care. Those bouillon cubes, for example, were very very important. It's not important that you know why. What is important is that you're going to forget and pop off, sneak a bit of food or tinker with something without asking. And when you do, dear, I am going to make up for ten years of coddling your backside. Ern? Harve? Do you have anything to add?"

We thought she had it covered rather well and said so. A long silence followed. Lance opened his mouth a few times but always closed it again. For the first time in my memory, he was not physically leaning in his mother's direction. At last Shar said, "Would you like to go now?"

"Yes'm." It was almost inaudible.

"I recommend it." A chastened Lance scuttled back to the card game. I wondered if Shar had exaggerated her willingness to whale her darling. No doubt Lance wondered, too, but not enough to check it out right then.

Ern asked, "You cold, Shar?"

"My shakes have nothing to do with the temperature," she said. "The more I said to Lance, the more I realized how true it was. I feel ashamed of myself but I want to go over there right now and—and—"

"And whack on him some," I finished for her. "You're okay, sis, but you're right about letting us tan his hide first. If you took first licks you might hurt him."

"We have casualties already." She laughed a bit shakily. "I wish we could go upstairs and get those quince preserves."

"They're in little jars in the root cellar," I said and went in search of the stuff, which didn't need special sealing when I used only honey as sweetener. For some reason honey seemed to dissuade mold; so much so that the fermenting of mead, a honey wine, was an expensive process. I couldn't even get the damned stuff to ferment with added yeast, and I knew a lot of old-timer tricks.

Returning with two jars of preserves under wax, I thought of using a candle as a food warmer. If we lit a candle in the root cellar, it would be downstream of us. Its heated air and carbon dioxide would tend to drift out through the valve Shar had made. Ern thought it worth a try, using an empty bean can with vents punched around its top and bottom as a chimney. For fondue warmers I had a dozen squat votive candles, which quickly became broad puddles of fluid wax unless you had a close-fitting container to keep the puddle from spreading. Ern made one from several thicknesses of foil.

Mrs. Baird's bedpan needed emptying, and Lance performed the chore with the expression of one who has an unexpected mouthful of green persimmon. Ern went to the root cellar with him and tried our little food warmer, which Shar wanted to use for hot water to make a quince-preserve gruel. If the Baird woman could swallow such warm sweet stuff she might—well, it might help. I'm sure my sis was thinking about the tremendous strain I had added to our survival efforts by bringing in a woman who was perhaps better dead than suffering. And who almost certainly would die regardless of anything medical science could have done.

 

The evening brought its full share of good and bad news. It was good that by nine o'clock the tunnel reading was down to one rem, since that meant the sizzling ferocity of radiation outside had dropped to "merely" two hundred rems an hour—half its level only a few hours previous. It was also nice that Shar remembered my hot-water heater in its insulated niche near the furnace, so much out of sight that I'd forgotten its fifty-gallon supply of clean water just waiting to be drained from its bottom faucet. Seventy gallons of drinking water might last us two weeks, and we could use the waterbed stuff for washing.

If we absolutely had to, we could boil the mattress water and hope the chemical would lose its potency. Ern guessed that a lot of people would be drinking from waterbeds, and with a dilution of one pint of chemical to two hundred gallons of water, the user only swallowed a few drops of mild poison in each gallon of water. Better than dying of thirst; far worse than drinking from your hot-water heater.

I couldn't decide whether it was good or bad news that, if the eleven o'clock news from Santa Rosa could be believed, our government had removed restrictions against the purchase of weapons by expatriate Cubans in Florida. There was no longer any doubt that Cuba had been a launch site for cruise missiles against Miami, Tampa, Eglin, and other targets. Want an Uzi with full auto fire? Bazooka? A few incendiary bombs? See your friendly dealer in the nearest bayou or yacht club, so long as you can say "Fidel come mierda sin sal" three times quickly. Castro's radar scopes were already measled with blips that consisted of every known vintage aircraft and surface craft, mostly crewed by disgruntled Cubans who had scores to settle and machismo to spare.

Later we might regret this response. For the moment Soviet Cuba had too much coastline to worry about to mount any further actions against the US. If many of those itchy-fingered expatriates went ashore and stayed there, Fidel's ass was grass. Put it down as good and bad news. Maybe "crazy news" was a better term.

On the bad-news side, the radio announced that grocery sales were suspended nationwide for the next few days, with certain exceptions. Perishable produce and milk could be sold in limited quantities while the government assessed stocks of food, and if you didn't have enough food to last two or three days, you were going to get pretty hungry. This rationing plan was a long-standing preparation by the feds, a decision that few of us had ever heard about. I gathered from the broadcast that the government had funded many studies on nuclear survival but hadn't published them widely, perhaps because so few of us cared to request them through our congressional reps or the Department of Commerce.

The radio claimed that an Oak Ridge study, Expedient Shelter Construction, was good news since surviving newspapers were printing millions of copies to be distributed across the land by every available means, including air drops of stapled copies. Was it such good news? I wished I thought so. The document hadn't reached the public in time. What did we care if five hundred copies gathered dust in emergency-technology libraries for a decade?

One news item was almost certainly not a government news release because it suggested that disaster-related documents could be bought in hard copy or microfiche from an address they repeated several times:

 

National Technical Information Service
U.S. Department of Commerce
5285 Port Royal Road
Springfield, Virginia 22161

 

I was sure the item was an ill-advised brainstorm by a local reporter, since the postal service couldn't possibly be functioning well enough to respond to millions of suddenly fascinated citizens who'd never heard of the NTIS before. If they'd known and cared years earlier the item might've been of tremendous importance. Now? Much too little, a little too late.

The news of the Bay Area was too awesomely bad for belief if you listened between the lines. From San Mateo to Palo Alto and in most of Fremont, fallout was only a few rems per hour, though unofficial traffic in those areas would be by bike or on foot. Mill Valley, too, had escaped the brunt of nuke hammer blows. The main population centers were discussed only as a list of places declared off limits and subject to martial law, where deputized crews probed into the debris as far as they dared: San Rafael, San Francisco, Burlingame, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Jose, Hayward, Oakland, Vallejo.

Shar jotted down all the details we could recall from the broadcasts, on the theory that we didn't yet know which detail might save our collective skin in the long run. We'd have plenty of time to cobble up notes on the area maps in my office long before we risked going outside.

Within our own tiny subterranean world we made our own bad news. Though Devon managed to get his mother to swallow some lukewarm quince gruel, she couldn't keep it down. He drank a half-pint of it only after Shar insisted that there would be plenty for both of them. When Shar brought up the question of the solitary bouillon cube it seemed a small thing, but it forced a decision none of us wanted to make.

Despite her youth, Kate Gallo was adult in every practical sense. That's why, when Shar demanded a committee decision on which of the Bairds would get the pitiful antidiarrhea dose of clear bouillon broth, I insisted that Kate have her say in it. I had to wake her. By then the kids were asleep.

After fifteen minutes of "yes-but," Ern said with a sigh, "It boils down to one likely fact, one agreement, and a hundred conjectures. Probable fact: Mrs. Baird won't be with us much longer, no matter what we do. Anybody disagree with that?" Nobody did. "And we seem to be agreed that if one cup of broth is barely enough to matter, splitting it between them would probably make it a pointless gesture.

"But the boy may be in the same fix as his mother. I've noticed a few blisters on his hands and neck. Still, he may pull through in spite of that. I think it's time for a vote," he finished.

In a small voice Kate asked, "Couldn't we have a secret ballot?"

"Why didn't I think of that," Shar said with a smile and quickly tore four small squares of paper, writing "M" and "F" on each before folding them. "Just circle which should get the broth, male or female," she said, handing the ballots out. Perhaps my sis was trying to make us more objective with this abstraction from names to simple symbols. If so, it didn't work.

Ern took the pen, did something with it in shadow, handed the pen to Kate. I had no doubt with his engineering-determinist's mind, he favored Devon, who had a fighting chance.

Kate needed lots of time. I figured her for the one most likely to favor Mrs. Baird, since the woman, like Kate herself had been, was an underdog.

Shar took the pen and turned away for only a moment before passing the instrument to me. I needed only a moment, too.

Then Shar took the folded squares, shook them between cupped hands, and opened them.

On three of them, neither letter was circled. On the fourth was a circle around the "M." "Three abstentions," Kate snorted. "That's totally unfair!"

"It does provide a decision," said Shar.

"Forced on one of us alone," said Kate, her voice rising until she caught herself. Of course only one of us knew which three had abstained. Kate went on, "If this is to be a committee decision, we should all take part."

The slow precision with which she fashioned another ballot told me that Shar was affronted by this snip of a girl. "Very well, we'll try again," said my sis, her mouth set primly.

We all took longer the second time. When Shar counted the ballots there was no longer any question; there was still one abstention, but the other three votes favored Devon. We all breathed more easily. No one said anything about that abstention, since the abstainer could not have changed the consensus.

Before settling back to sleep Kate muttered, "One lousy bouillon cube. I wish Lance had eaten it."

"No you don't, Kate," Shar said gently. "It may be the tiny nudge that saves a life."

"I hope so. You'll have to claim we found another one and gave it to Mrs. Baird."

"I intended to. Good night, Kate," spoken with respect.

I padded back to the root cellar and warmed some instant coffee that tasted of quince preserves. It was my first warm brew in days, a scent of ripe summer fruit that deepened my anguish over the decisions we had made; unknown decisions we would have to make later; the millions who were no longer alive to puzzle over decisions. Presently the tepid coffee began to taste of salt and I drained it, brewing more for Ern.

But my brother-in-law slumped snoring at the air pump he had contrived, the brandy bottle empty beside him. I roused him and took his place, unwilling to blame him for the dereliction. I had known Ern's mild dependence on booze for a long time, and I'd brought the stuff to him myself.

 

 

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