Bombs Away

16

More and more Germans flooded into the emergency militia. Konrad Adenauer still wasn’t calling it an army, but it sure looked like one to Gustav Hozzel. He, of course, was on the inside looking out. However much it looked like an army, it didn’t look like the old Wehrmacht. The men wore American olive drab, not Feldgrau. They wore U.S. rank badges on their sleeves, not German ones on shoulder straps. They still wore those U.S. helmets, too. Gustav did miss his old Stahlhelm, but not enough to risk getting caught by the Russians with one on his head. And they used American weapons, with a few British Sten guns and mortars mixed in.

No matter what they looked like, most of them behaved as if the last war had ended week before last-or maybe as if it hadn’t ended at all. Some of the volunteers were kids who’d been too young to take on the Ivans before…although boys of twelve and thirteen had fought in Berlin. A far larger number were old Frontschweine, ready for another go at the Bolsheviks.

The Germans didn’t enjoy the good, hard physical shape they’d had six or eight years before. A stretch of peacetime would do that to you. But they made up for it by knowing every trick in the book. Anybody the Russians hadn’t been able to kill was good at his trade almost by definition.

Some of them fought with a reckless disregard for life and limb that startled even Gustav. “Rolf, what unit were you in the last time around?” he asked a fellow in his company after the man charged a Russian machine-gun nest. He made the Ivans keep their heads down with his Sten, then finished them off with grenades.

Rolf’s cheeks hollowed as he took a drag on a cigarette. After blowing out a stream of smoke, he answered, “LAH. How come?”

“Oh,” Gustav said. The Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was part of the Waffen-SS, not the Wehrmacht. It had started out as the Führer’s personal bodyguard unit, and ended up as one of the best German panzer divisions. But the Waffen-SS combat style was more aggressive than the one the Wehrmacht favored. (So was the SS taste for atrocities, though the Wehrmacht wasn’t a dewy pink innocent there, either.) After a moment, Gustav did ask, “Have you got a blood-group tattoo?”

“Not any more. Had it cut out years ago. Hurt like a bitch when I did, but the scar hardly shows now,” Rolf said.

“All right.” Gustav left it there. The Russians slaughtered the men with those tattoos they caught, the same way they bumped off soldiers with German helmets. To them, both were marks of Nazism.

Well, if Rolf came out of the LAH, he damn well had been a Nazi, and doubtless still was. He might well have been an officer then, too. The tattoos were required for them, voluntary for other ranks. That he’d made a point of obliterating his argued he’d needed to. Here, he was just another private…who happened to fight like a homicidal maniac.

Gustav let it go. That kind of stuff was ancient history as far as he was concerned, even if the Russians saw things differently.

Rolf held out the pack of cigarettes. “Want one?” he asked. He could be plenty friendly-as long as you were on his side.

“Thanks.” Gustav took one and leaned close to get a light from his comrade’s glowing coal. He drew in smooth, mild smoke-they were American Luckies.

“We are going to lick the Reds,” Rolf said in tones that brooked no contradiction.

“Well, sure.” Gustav wouldn’t have put his one and only, irreplaceable body on the line if he hadn’t thought so.

“We’re going to lick them,” Rolf repeated, as if Gustav hadn’t spoken. “We should have lined up with the Amis to do it at the end of the last war, but better late than never. We’ll lick them, and we’ll clean out all the puppet regimes they set up in Eastern Europe, and we’ll drive them out of all the land they stole. And Germany will take its natural place in the sun again.”

“Aber natürlich,” Gustav said, though he feared Rolf wouldn’t recognize irony when he heard it. And the ex-LAH man had to mean at the top of the heap when he said natural place in the sun. Gustav added, “The Americans and the Russians have the bomb. We don’t. That’s a problem, you know.”

Rolf looked at him the way a Waffen-SS soldier would have eyed someone accused of defeatism. “We will. Our scientists are plenty smart enough-the best in the world, in fact. All we have to do is clear the foreign soldiers from our soil.”

Some of the foreign soldiers on German soil opened up with a machine gun. Gustav started to reach for his own weapon, then relaxed. The Ivans weren’t close enough to be dangerous-yet. To take Rolf’s mind off dreams of world domination, Gustav said, “I’ve got another question for you.”

“Go ahead-shoot,” Rolf said, amiably enough.

“You were with the Leibstandarte at the end, right? Through the last attack in Hungary after Budapest fell?”

“Operation Spring Awakening? Yeah, I was there for that. We drove them back for a solid week, but in the end they just had too goddamn many tanks and too many men.”

In the end, the Russians had had too many tanks and too many men-to say nothing of too many allies-everywhere. That wasn’t what Gustav wanted to talk about, though. “When the retreat started again, the Führer ordered LAH to take off their cuff titles with his signature, didn’t he?”

“Yes.” Rolf scowled. “He didn’t understand the situation down there.”

By the end of the war, from everything Gustav could gather, Hitler hadn’t understood the situation anywhere. But that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about, either. He said, “I heard that, when you guys heard about that order, what you took off were your medals-and you sent ’em to him in a chamber pot.”

“Oh. That story. I’ve heard it, too.” Rolf nodded. “It isn’t true. It’s cute, but it isn’t true. Sepp Dietrich was commanding the Sixth SS Panzer Army then. The order came through him, and it never got past his headquarters. He figured the Führer was having a bad day, so he didn’t forward it.”

“So you wore the cuff titles to the end?”

“When things fell apart, we all started shedding the SS stuff. You didn’t want to be wearing it if the Bolsheviks caught you.” Rolf drew a finger across his throat. Now Gustav nodded; he knew about that. The SS man continued, “But we didn’t cut off the titles right after Spring Awakening.”

“I get you,” Gustav said. He wondered whether Rolf was telling the truth about the medals in the chamber pot. The LAH man had been on the spot; Gustav hadn’t. But he’d heard the tale from people he had no reason to doubt. Rolf might be sanitizing things for the sake of his unit’s reputation.

Or he might not. Gustav knew he couldn’t be sure himself. He also knew Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler had a reputation worth protecting only among the most pro-Nazi Germans. To the Russians and the Americans, it had just been an uncommonly nasty enemy outfit.

A jeep rolled up. This second-string, hastily equipped unit was more motorized than the fanciest SS panzer division had been. That casual show of American wealth was another reason the Third Reich had lost the war.

Sitting next to the driver was Max Bachman. The back seat was full of ration boxes-more American goodies. Max started tossing them to the resting men. “Eat up! Eat up!” he cried merrily. “Hearty meals for the condemned men!”

“Put a sock in it, Max,” Gustav said, but not before he’d snagged some food for himself.

“You know that loudmouthed clown?” Rolf asked, tearing open his own C-ration package.

“Know him? Back in Fulda, I work for him.” After a moment’s thought, Gustav amended that: “Worked for him, I mean. God only knows what it’s like with the commissars giving the orders there.”

“Not good.” Rolf took the bayonet off his belt and opened a can of stew with it. That was a common use for bayonets these days. Another was candlestick: the socket was just the right size to hold a typical German candle. A bayonet could still be a fighting knife or a spearpoint on the end of a rifle. It could, but hardly ever was.

“Nowhere near good. My wife’s back there. I hope Luisa’s still back there,” Gustav said, and opened his own can of soggy ham and eggs.

Rolf set a surprisingly gentle hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, pal. That’s hard.” They set their cans on a grill over the fire to heat.

–

The cook gave Isztvan Szolovits a chunk of black bread and a chunk of ham. He cut the bread in half with his bayonet and surrounded the ham with it. The sandwich was the neatest way he could think of to eat what he had.

One of the other soldiers said, “I’m gonna tell your rabbi on you!”

“He won’t be able to hear you, Andras,” Szolovits answered, and took a bite. It was pretty good ham.

“What? Why the hell not?” Andras Orban demanded, as Isztvan had hoped he would.

“Because your head’s so far up your ass, no noise can get out.” The Jew gathered himself. If Andras wanted a fight, he’d give him one. He’d had more fights like that than he cared to remember. Knuckling under seemed worse.

Andras’ jaw dropped. If he was looking for a deferential Jew or a cowardly Jew, he was looking in the wrong place. He started to get to his feet, but the snickers from the rest of the Magyar soldiers eating and smoking and resting there made him hesitate.

Then Sergeant Gergely snapped, “Cut the crap, Orban. You ragged him, he ragged you back. I think his crack was funnier than yours, but what the hell? It evens out. Your face is funnier than his.”

That made more soldiers laugh at Andras. He turned a dull red. He wasn’t particularly handsome, though Szolovits wouldn’t have called him funny-looking. Well, you aren’t all that handsome yourself, Isztvan thought. He also wasn’t all that Jewish-looking. He had light brown hair, hazel eyes, and an ordinary nose. Only his mouth and the shape of his chin hinted at what he was.

But Gergely hadn’t finished. “I’m going to keep my eye on you, Orban,” he went on. “You think we don’t have enough trouble fighting the Americans and the Germans? You have to stir something up with your own countryman?”

“Him? My countryman, Comrade Sergeant?” Andras Orban looked astonished. “Isn’t he just a waddayacallem? A rootless cosmopolite, that’s it.”

Rootless cosmopolite was what a good Marxist-Leninist said when he meant kike. It had a fine ideological ring to it, but what lay behind it was old as the hills.

However it sounded, it just made Gergely roll his eyes. “He’s here, you stupid sack of shit. He’s got our uniform on. He carries a rifle just like yours. He points it at the enemies of the Hungarian People’s Republic. From everything I’ve seen, he’s done fine since we came over the border. You haven’t exactly been the world’s biggest hero, so keep your fucking trap shut till you are, right?” Andras didn’t say anything. Sergeant Gergely fixed him with a stare like twin flamethrowers. “Right?”

“Uh, right, Comrade Sergeant.” The soldier looked as if he wished he’d never opened his mouth. He also looked as if he wished the ground would open up and swallow him. There Szolovits sympathized. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t felt the same way himself plenty of times.

The next interesting question was whether Andras Orban would decide that bothering him was more trouble than it was worth, or whether the other soldier would want to get even. Szolovits had never wished harm on anybody from his own unit, but in Andras’ case he might make an exception.

As evening fell, he took his turn in a foxhole a couple of hundred meters west of the main Hungarian position. In case the Americans or the Germans tried a sneak attack, he could give the alarm and start shooting…unless they were too sneaky, and murdered him before he got the chance.

Just to ensure that he’d be able to spot them from a long way away, rain started coming down no more than ten minutes after he went out there. He buttoned up his greatcoat collar tight, to keep out as many drips as he could. The fabric was supposed to be waterproof, but it wasn’t.

He remembered German motorcyclists scooting through Budapest before the city fell to the Russians. They’d worn rubberized greatcoats that really did shed water. Next to those, his was-and performed like-a cheap imitation.

He thought about lighting a cigarette, but didn’t bother. In the wet, he doubted he could keep it going long enough to get any enjoyment from it. The bottom of the hole turned muddy. Puddles started forming. His boots were supposed to be waterproof, too. From what he’d seen so far, they came closer than the greatcoat did, anyhow.

As long as the Americans stayed farther than ten meters or so from his post, they could hit the Hungarian troops behind him with a whole armored division, and he’d never know it till the shooting started. The way the rain was coming down, even that might not do it. He pushed the helmet farther forward on his head so the drips from the brim wouldn’t hit his nose. But that made the drips from the rear of the helmet dribble down the back of his neck, so he fiddled with it again.

Was that a noise? Would the Americans be daft enough to try something on such a miserable night? Clutching his rifle, he called, “Halt! Who goes? Give the password!” He hoped he didn’t sound too much like a scared kid. If those were Americans or Germans, they wouldn’t understand Magyar, and they would open up on him.

But, like a sign from the heavens, the password did come, followed by a wry chuckle he knew too well. “Just wanted to see if you were on your toes,” Sergeant Gergely said.

“Of course I am,” Szolovits answered, giddy with relief. “If I weren’t, I’d be drowning in here.”

“Cute,” Gergely said, but he chuckled again. After a moment, he went on, “You know, I was gonna bump Nagy up to lance-corporal till he caught one.”

“I’m not surprised,” Isztvan said, though he was surprised the sergeant told him. “Tibor was a good guy.” He hadn’t even thought about how much he missed the fallen soldier. It wasn’t that he hadn’t let himself, only that he’d been too busy trying to stay alive in his own right.

“What I’m thinking now is, maybe you’re the one I ought to tap for that slot,” Gergely said slowly.

What Isztvan Szolovits was thinking now was that, when the sergeant was fighting for Ferenc Szalasi’s Arrow Cross regime, Gergely would have shoved him into a train bound for Auschwitz and then toasted the departure with a glass of Tokay. Life could get very peculiar. So could the way people talked to each other. Szolovits came out with as much as he thought he could: “In spite of everything?”

“Yeah, in spite of everything.” The noncom didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “You’ve got your head on straight, and that counts for more than whether your cock’s clipped.”

“Gosh, Sergeant, you say the sweetest things,” Isztvan said.

This time, Gergely laughed out loud, which didn’t happen every day. “Menj a halál faszára,” he said. Szolovits hadn’t dreamt anyone could tell him to go sit on death’s dick and sound affectionate doing it, but Sergeant Gergely managed.

“What happens if you promote me and I order somebody to do something and he tells me that?” Szolovits asked. “Somebody like, oh, Andras?”

“Well, there’s two things you can do. You can tell me, and I’ll take care of it. Or you can whale the shit out of the pussy yourself and go on about your business. The less a sergeant hears about the little stuff, the happier he is.”

Isztvan wasn’t sure he could whale the shit out of Andras Orban. He was ready to try, though; a Jew who wasn’t ready to fight in post-Fascist Hungary would be a doormat all his life. You did what you had to do, not what you wanted to do.

Gergely’s other comment was also interesting. Szolovits asked, “Is the captain happy when he doesn’t hear much from you?”

“Sure he is,” Gergely answered. “He doesn’t hear about picky crap because I take care of it. The colonel doesn’t want to hear about garbage the captain ought to handle, either. Hell, you think Stalin wants to listen to arguments about which army goes into which front? That’s why he’s got generals, for Christ’s sake.”

“I…hadn’t thought much about what Stalin wants,” Szolovits said. If he had thought about it, it was to assume that whatever Stalin wanted, he got.

“In that case, you’re even. Stalin hasn’t thought about what you want, either.” Gergely chuckled once more. So did Isztvan, dutifully. A superior’s jokes were always funny.

–

When you looked at a kolkhoz, you saw the residence halls and the barns and the other buildings at the center. Spreading out from them, you saw fields of grain and meadows where the collective farm’s cattle and sheep grazed. As Ihor Shevchenko knew, you also saw that the buildings were shabby and faded and that no one worked like a Stakhanovite to bring in extra cubic meters of barley or to get the cows to give extra liters of milk.

What was the point? If you did work like a Stakhanovite, the state would take the crop and whatever it needed from the livestock. You wouldn’t get anything extra for doing more. You wouldn’t get in trouble for doing less, not unless you did so very little that the commissars couldn’t even pretend you weren’t sitting there playing with your dick. So people did as little as they could to get by, or maybe a touch less than that.

Almost everywhere on the kolkhoz, that was so. It was so almost everywhere on every kolkhoz anywhere in the Soviet Union, and on the collective farms that had sprouted in Stalin’s Eastern European satellites after the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. Ihor didn’t know whether the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea boasted kolkhozes of their own. If they did, it was bound to be true almost everywhere on those collective farms as well.

Almost. Near the buildings at any kolkhoz, women tended tiny private plots. No careless turning of the soil there. No slipshod weeding. What they grew on those little plots, they could keep. They could eat it themselves or take it to unofficial markets and sell it or trade it for things they needed but wouldn’t get through regular channels for years, if ever.

As women raised carrots or cucumbers or tomatoes or radishes or onions or lettuces on their plots, the men on collective farms tended to a pig or two or some chickens or ducks. Those animals, those birds, had care lavished on them that the beasts the kolkhoz as a whole was responsible for never saw. When you slaughtered your own pig, you made damn sure it had a nice layer of tasty fat under its hide. A scrawny, razor-backed collective-farm pig? Who wanted a beast like that?

When you took care of your own pig, it got as friendly as a dog. You got to like it. Or, at least, Ihor got to like the shoats he raised. But, while he got to like them as animals, he knew he would like them even better as meat. So he patted this one’s head and scratched its ears, but he had a knife in his other hand even so.

“Sorry, Nestor,” he said. Nestor snuffled. He was good-natured even for a pampered private pig. That wouldn’t do him any good, but he didn’t know it. Plenty of good-natured people had tried to stay friendly when the Chekists grabbed them in the great purges before the Hitlerite war. They turned into sausages, too. Ihor turned to Anya. “Bucket ready?”

“Right here.” She tapped the galvanized pail with the side of her foot.

“Dobre,” Ihor said. “Put it in place.” Steering it like a footballer, she slid it under Nestor’s neck. Ihor patted the pig one more time. Then he cut its throat.

He hung on while Nestor thrashed and made horrified drowning noises. Red and hot and iron-smelling, blood poured into the bucket. After half a minute or so, the pig went limp. Ihor thought about blood pudding and blood sausages and ham and ribs and chops and potatoes fried in lard.

He waited till he was sure Nestor was gone before gutting the pig. He didn’t want it to suffer any more than it had to. He’d seen too many suffering men during the war to care to inflict needless pain. Some people didn’t care. They were the ones who hit their dogs and kicked their cats after they fought with their wives. It’s only a dumb animal, they would say. Ihor thought they were the dumb animals.

Guts meant sausage casings and chitterlings. Liver, kidneys…The less you wasted, the more you had.

Another kolkhoznik ambled by as Ihor went on with the butchering. “You’re my good, true friend, aren’t you, Ihor?” he called.

“Mykola, you look like a hound sitting in front of a butcher’s window with its tongue hanging out,” Ihor said.

“The hound hopes he gets some scraps. So do I.” Mykola threw back his head and howled.

“We’ll see what we can work out,” Ihor said. Mykola wasn’t anywhere close to the best pigkeeper or chicken farmer on the collective farm. But his clever hands could fix anything that broke. When you had something somebody wanted and he could do things for you, you’d cook up some kind of deal.

Meat to eat fresh, meat to salt, meat to smoke, meat to pickle, fat to render…Nestor would keep Ihor’s belly full, and Anya’s, for quite a while. Even so, they wouldn’t be able to eat all of him by themselves. Some would get traded to Mykola and other people like him.

And Ihor took a slab of ribs to Petro Hapochka. In the days of the Tsars, Petro would have been a village headman. Most of the Ukrainians who had been village headmen then died in Stalin’s famine. Hapochka’s title was kolkhoz chairman. He had to deal with more senior Soviet functionaries at the oblast level. But on the collective farm he did what a village headman would have done in his village in the old days. He made sure the work that had to be done got done. He kept quarrels among the kolkhozniks from getting out of hand. He tried to stop drunks from gumming up the works.

He also got the rewards a village headman would have in the old days. If you didn’t want your life to be one nuisance after another, you kept him sweet. No law said you had to. Laws, in fact, said you had to do no such thing. The USSR’s constitution made it look like the freest country in the world. You couldn’t count on what laws said.

“Bozhemoi, Ihor, what have you got there?” he said when Ihor came up to him. Petro was in his late forties. He walked with a limp worse than Ihor’s, and well he might have: he’d lost his left foot in a German minefield in the fighting near Voronezh in 1943.

“I finally went and slaughtered Nestor,” Ihor answered. “I figured you might find somebody on the kolkhoz who could use these.”

“I might. Tak, I just might.” That Hapochka used Ukrainian showed he was pleased; Russian was the tongue of official formality. Had Ihor come out and said he was giving the chairman the ribs, that would have been bad form. Had Petro given any hint he would keep them for himself, that also would have been bad manners. They understood each other, and the game, perfectly well.

“Comrade Chairman…?” Ihor switched gears.

“What is it?” Hapochka’s tone was expansive, not suspicious. Those ribs paid for a question or two.

“Do the people who’re supposed to know such things know when they’ll put Kiev back together again?”

“Nobody has any idea, Ihor. Not a hint. Some of the people who would plan things like that were in Kiev when the bomb hit. They aren’t there any more.” A village headman would have crossed himself. Petro didn’t, but looked as if he wanted to. He went on, “And the people who would have told the people in Kiev what to do were in Moscow, and Moscow took a worse pasting than Kiev.”

“That’s what I’ve heard, too.” Ihor had mixed feelings about Moscow, as which Ukrainian did not? Moscow forced them to be part of a country where they weren’t quite first-class citizens. Then again, Moscow had saved them from being part of a country where they’d get worked like draft animals and knocked over the head if they faltered. Next to Hitler, Stalin seemed a bargain. Before the Great Patriotic War, who could have imagined that?

“We just have to go on about our business till things straighten out,” Petro said. “Sooner or later, they will. They’re bound to.”

“Sure, Comrade Chairman.” Ihor nodded. He wondered whether either of them believed it.

–

Herschel Weissman puffed on his Havana and said, “We have an order for a refrigerator down in Torrance.”

“We do?” Aaron Finch said, in place of telling his boss You’re kidding me, right? If you drew a line between the Blue Front warehouse and the South Bay suburb of Torrance, downtown Los Angeles would be somewhere close to the middle. Or rather, it would have been till the Russian A-bomb forcibly removed it from the map.

“We do,” Weissman said. “I want you and Jim to take the truck down there. You do the driving. It’s liable to be too complicated for him.”

“How did we get the order, anyway?” Aaron asked. Telephone connections between that part of the L.A. area and this one weren’t just spotty. For the most part, they didn’t exist.

“The lady wrote me a letter,” Weissman answered. “A very nice letter. It got from there to here. Since it did, I expect you can get from here to there.”

“A letter doesn’t have to worry about radiation sickness.”

“Maybe not, but the people who carry it do. It’s okay if you go around downtown, Aaron.”

“Thanks a bunch!” Aaron said. Weissman was feeling generous, wasn’t he? It wasn’t just okay for him to skirt downtown. It was mandatory. Inside a circle more than a mile wide, there not only weren’t any roads, there wasn’t much of anything. Inside a considerably wider circle, the road hadn’t been cleared of all the buildings and poles and walls and fences the explosion had littered them with. People had been evacuated from a wider circle yet, a circle without electricity or running water. They filled three or four town-sized refugee camps.

You could say that area centered on downtown was a circle the twentieth century didn’t touch. But the twentieth century had touched it pretty goddamn hard if you looked at things another way.

Jim Summers grumbled, “I oughta wear my lead-lined skivvies for a trip like this.”

“If you’ve got ’em, wear ’em,” Aaron said. As far as he knew-it wasn’t as if he’d gone looking-no one had been selling lead-lined clothes before the war started. You could sure buy them now. How much good they did was a hotly, so to speak, argued question.

“I don’t,” Jim said. “So the closer we go to downtown, the better the chance we got of fryin’ our nuts. Or am I missin’ somethin’?”

“Sounds about right,” Aaron said.

“What we oughta do, then, is go way the hell over to Pacific Coast Highway and head down it so we keep the hell away from them atoms,” Summers said.

“That’s wasting an awful lot of time and gasoline,” Aaron said dubiously.

“Gas is cheap.”

“Not since the bombs hit. It’s still over fifty cents a gallon. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Jim Summers rolled his eyes. “Anybody’d reckon you was the Hebe, not old man Weissman.” He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and took two singles out of it. “This oughta cover the difference.”

He was right; two bucks would more than take care of the gas for the extra distance. All the same, Aaron set his chin and said, “Can you pull two or three hours out of your back pocket the same way? We can get over the hill through Sepulveda, maybe even through Laurel Canyon.”

“I know what’s eatin’ you.” Summers wasn’t smart, or anywhere close to it. He could be shrewd, though. “You want to see what the bomb wreckage looks like, from as close as you can git. I got news for you, pal-curiosity killed the cat.”

“Satisfaction brought it back,” Aaron retorted. He didn’t like being so easy to see through.

“Not if it was glowin’ in the dark to begin with.”

“Mr. Weissman said I should do the driving for this run.” Aaron didn’t tell Jim that was because the boss didn’t trust Summers not to make a hash of it.

“Says you! We’ll see about that.” Jim stumped off to have it out with the boss. Aaron could have told him that wasn’t such a hot idea, but he didn’t think Jim would have listened to him. As Aaron expected, Jim came back in short order, more crestfallen than he’d set out. Aaron had pulled punches; Herschel Weissman wasn’t the kind of man who’d see any reason to bother. After muttering to himself for a few seconds, Jim said, “Awright, smart guy. We’ll do it your way. But if your next kid has green hair and eyes on stalks, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Aaron didn’t worry about that. From what the doctors said, Ruth was lucky to have had Leon. She’d lost a girl before she managed to do it. They said she’d have to be meshiggeh to try again. Aaron didn’t love rubbers, but he didn’t want to endanger his wife. Rubbers it was, unless they did something that didn’t risk getting her pregnant.

As for the green hair and the eyes on stalks, Aaron couldn’t imagine Jim reading a science-fiction pulp with a story about mutants. That had to come straight from the comic books.

Aaron did decide to go as far west as Sepulveda before turning south. Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon might still let out into bomb-damaged parts of town. Before the bomb fell, it would have been an easy trip. The Pasadena Freeway-people also called it the Arroyo Seco, the Dry Wash-had been there for a while; they were calling its southern extension the Harbor Freeway even if it hadn’t come close to the harbor yet. After it ended, Vermont or Western would have finished the route. Now they were finished. The newer Hollywood Freeway met the Pasadena downtown. That would have worked, too. No more.

The Blue Front truck chugged up to the top of Sepulveda Pass, then down the other side. As the Santa Monica Mountains shrank to foothills and then flatland, Aaron craned his neck so he could look east. So did Jim, for all his complaining.

“Oh, Lord,” he said softly. Aaron nodded. They couldn’t see well, because closer buildings that still stood kept getting in the way, but the background to those buildings that should have been there…wasn’t. It had been swept away, as if by the fist of an angry child-an angry child who happened to be several miles tall.

At Sunset, Aaron resisted temptation. He got his reward, if that was what it was, by driving past an enormous refugee encampment. National Guardsmen patrolled a barbed-wire perimeter. People dejectedly mooched about from one tent to another. The wind came out of the west, from the direction of the camp. Despite a cigarette in his mouth, Aaron made a face.

“Pew!” Jim Summers said. “Buncha stinking skunks. Don’t they ever take a bath?”

“I wonder how often they get the chance,” Aaron said.

“If they ever get it, they don’t use it,” Jim said.

At Wilshire, Aaron yielded, turning left. Jim called him some amazing things when he did. “I love you, too,” he answered, deadpan. That produced more creativity from Summers. Aaron kept heading east, toward the blast zone, anyhow.

Wilshire stayed open for some distance. Even when buildings had fallen down, the ruins were bulldozed off the street. Finally, at Crenshaw, sawhorses kept him from going any farther. A sign declared that it was A FEDERAL RECLAMATION PROJECT. Under the stenciled words, hand-painted letters added WE SHOOT LOOTERS! NO QUESTIONS ASKED FIRST! To drive home that point, more National Guardsmen and some cops prowled the area. All of them, men in blue included, carried rifles with fixed bayonets. Aaron turned right and headed south.

Bulldozer crews kept shoving rubble out of the way. Like most of the soldiers and policemen, the drivers and a lot of other workers wore masks like the ones doctors used in operating rooms. Seeing that, Aaron thoughtfully rolled up his window. It might not help, but it couldn’t hurt.

He rolled it down again when they got farther south. He could look east and see what was left of the Coliseum. It had hosted the 1932 Olympics; the Trojans and Bruins and Rams played there. Or they had. The great stone-and-concrete bowl looked more battered than pictures he’d seen of the ancient Colosseum in Rome.

“What a mess!” Jim said. “What a fuckin’ mess!”

Aaron nodded. That he could see what remained of the Coliseum said that everything in the two or three miles between him and it had been knocked flat. Farther north, City Hall, which had been by far the tallest building in an earthquake-wary town, was only a melted stump. If the earthquakes don’t get you, then the atoms will, he thought. Los Angeles would be a long time getting back on its feet, if it ever did.

The farther south he went, the easier that was to forget…for a while. Then the truck passed a lamppost with a body hanging from it. Around the dead man’s neck was a placard: THIEF. Jim Summers whistled softly. “They ain’t fuckin’ around.”

“No,” Aaron said in a voice quieter than he’d looked to use. “They aren’t.”

Damage from the downtown bomb faded as they kept on; they hadn’t come far enough to see any from the one that took out the port. Mrs. O’Brynne of Torrance was lucky. Her little suburb, full of fig and orange orchards, seemed untouched.

Aaron and Jim lugged the refrigerator inside, being careful to keep it upright while they did. They plugged it in. She signed the paperwork. A baby started to cry while she did. “My little girl,” she said.

“They do that,” Aaron agreed. “Not very old, is she? A couple-three months? I’ve got a little boy who’ll be two in May.” She handed him the clipboard. He checked. She’d put her Jane Hancock everywhere it needed to be. “Much obliged, ma’am.”

“Purty gal,” Jim said when they got back in the truck. “Reminded me a little o’ that Katharine Hepburn.”

“If you say so.” Aaron didn’t want to argue. Mrs. O’Brynne wasn’t bad, but he didn’t think she was in that league.

“A little, I said.” Summers changed the subject. “When you head back north, can you kindly stay farther away from the bomb, huh? You seen what you wanted to see.”

“Oh, all right.” You had to give to get. Aaron put the truck in gear.