The Valley-Westside War

Two

What the Westside called a City Council meeting wasn't like the ones in the home timeline. Liz didn't think so. anyway. The Council decided whatever it decided and then told the people what that was. That was what the meeting was about.

When Liz complained to her dad, he smiled a sour smile. “It's not as different as you think, hon,” he said. “They're smoother about hiding what they're really up to in the home timeline-I will say that for them.”

The nine members of the City Council knew what they wanted to get across. What had been the UCLA Sculpture Garden was now the Westside assembly area. Some of the sculptures still stood. Others-mostly the abstract ones-had disappeared, probably melted down for the metal in them.

Ambassador Mort was tall and skinny. He wore a double-breasted Old Time sport jacket over baggy modern pants. “The Valley humiliated me!” he shouted to the people who'd come to the meeting. “Humiliated me, I tell you! They put me on a donkey with my face turned towards its tail and rode me to the border that way. It's a shame and a disgrace, that's what it is!”

It was also the standard way to send an ambassador home when you declared war on his country. Mort didn't say anything about that. How many of the men and women listening to him knew what the custom was? Not many- Liz was sure of that. The Council wanted to get people all worked up, and knew how to get what it wanted.

A big man named Cal was the chairman of the City Council. He wore an Old Time jacket, too-an ugly plaid one. He also wore a big white Stetson for no reason Liz could see. “Are we going to let the Valley get away with treating our ambassador that way?” he shouted, his voice high and quick and glib. Liz wouldn't have wanted to buy a used car from him. “I don't think so!”

“No way! No way! No way!” people chanted. They were a claque, a group set up in advance to make the kind of noise their patrons wanted when their patrons wanted it. They were too loud and too smooth to be anything else. When others joined in the chant, they sounded different-less rehearsed, maybe.

“I'm gonna sic my dog on the Valley!” Cal shouted. That was no idle threat. Cal's dog was famed-and feared-all over the Westside. There weren't nearly so many mutations alter the atomic war as people had feared. But there were some, and that dog was descended from them. It was a German shepherd about three quarters as big as a horse, with teeth a Tyrannosaurus might have envied. It was, mostly, a nice dog. But if it got mad…

“Feed King Zev to it!” yelled somebody from the claque. In a moment, that whole group was shouting the phrase. Again, people who didn't belong joined more slowly. But they did join. The stage managing would have been too open, too blatant, to work in the home timeline- Liz hoped so, anyhow. But it did just fine here.

“So shall we show the Valley that they can't tell us what to do?” Cal asked.

“Yes!” ''That's right!” “Bet your bippy!” people shouted back. Liz didn't know what a bippy was. She wondered if the men who used the word knew what it meant. Back in 1967, it had probably had a meaning. Now it was just a noise here. People said it without thinking about it. There were words like that in the home timeline, too.

“Is it war, then?” Cal wanted to make it official.

“War!” The word came back as a roar. That seemed official enough to Liz.

It seemed official enough to the head of the Westside City Council, too. “Thanks, folks,” he said. “We'll lick 'em. You wait and see. When they got a good look at my dog Pots, they'll be so scared, they'll run away before the fighting really gets going.”

Everybody cheered. As the meeting was breaking up, Liz asked her father, “Why does he call that monster of a dog Pots?”

“Because nobody here seems to remember who the Fenris Wolf was,” Dad said, which both was and wasn't an answer. He added, “Besides, whatever you call a critter like that, the dog is bigger than the name.”

There were old children's books in the home timeline about a dog like that, although he wasn't mean. What was his name? Clarence? That was close, but it wasn't right. “ Clifford!” Liz exclaimed.

“Where did you come up with that?” Dad said. “My grandmother had some of those books. She read them to me when I was little. Her mother used to read them to her, she said.”

“Oh, wow,” Liz said-in the home timeline, a phrase even more old-fashioned than Clifford books. People still used it here, and it did come in handy now and then. She went on, “Will the Westside win?”

“They sure think so,” her father replied. “But the Valley thinks it'll win, too, or it wouldn't have started the war in the first place. I haven't been up there. I don't know what all they've got. I don't know how serious they are about the fighting, either. That's one of the reasons people fight wars-to find out how serious both sides are.”

“If the Westside weren't serious, it wouldn't have built that wall across the 405,” Liz said.

“Or maybe it just didn't think the Valley would think the wall was worth fighting about.” Dad shrugged. “'If it didn't, it was wrong. And it looks like a lot of people will get hurt because of that.”

If the fighting came all the way down into Westwood, the Mendozas could escape back to the home timeline. A transposition chamber would whisk them away in nothing flat. The locals weren't so lucky. They were stuck here. They had to hope the struggle stayed far away. Liz hoped for the same thing. She didn't want anything bad to happen to the locals, and she really didn't want anything bad to happen to UCLA.

Dan watched a couple of officers load an impressive-looking piece of ordnance onto a horse's back. “Wow,” he said. “What's that?” The cartridges gleamed in the sunshine. Each one looked as big as his thumb. The weapon had to come from the Old Time. Nobody nowadays could make anything like that.

“Machine gun-.50-caliber,” one of them answered proudly. “We test-fired it, and it shoots great.”

“That is so cool!”' Dan said. “I didn't know anything like that was left in the armory.”

“It didn't come from the armory,” the captain said. “Scrounger found it in a house.”

“No kidding?” Dan said, and the officer nodded. Dan went on, “Ordinary people could have a piece like that in their houses? Wow! Old Time must've been something else.” That gun might beat the Westside all by itself now.

“Old Time was something else,” the other officer said.

“Oh, yes, sir.” Dan knew better than to show he disagreed with any officer, even when he did. But he didn't disagree with this one. “Ordinary people had guns like this, the way folks have belt knives now. Makes you wonder what all the kings- no, they called them presidents-had. though.”

“They had the Fire,” the first captain said grimly. “They had it, and they used it. And that's how come we don't have so much anymore.”

He was right about that. The Russians threw the Fire at America, and then the Americans threw it back. That was what the schoolbooks said, and why would they lie? Dan didn't know exactly where Russia was. Somewhere far away-he was sure of that, anyhow. Farther than TJ, farther than Vegas, farther than Frisco. You went a whole lot farther than that, you probably fell off the edge of the world. Schoolbooks also insisted the world was round. Again, why would they lie? But Dan had his doubts. The world sure looked flat to him. Well, bumpy in spots, but basically flat.

The officers with the machine gun looked at him, then at each other. The second one spoke up: “I bet you've got something you need to do, don't you, soldier? If you have time to rubberneck, we'll find you something to do.”

“Oh, no, sir. I've got plenty. It was just seeing the fancy gun that made me stop, that's all.” Dan saluted and beat a hasty retreat. You didn't always have to be busy in the army. But you always had to look busy. If you didn't look busy, somebody would make sure you were.

He hustled over to the barracks. He had a whetstone in his kit. He started using it to sharpen the points on his arrows. He'd sharpened them just the other day. They couldn't very well have got dull between then and now. Anybody who saw him, though, would think he had plenty of work and didn't need anything more. That was the point, all right.

Had officers and sergeants been so silly back in the Old Time? Dan didn't want to believe it. They'd known so much. They'd been able to do so many things. They wouldn't have wanted soldiers to waste time for the sake of wasting time… would they?

Of course, in the end the Old Time folks, the Americans and the Russians, had blown themselves up. They'd thrown away all their marvels, thrown them into the Fire. In school, the books and the teachers said they'd been about to fly to the moon before they went to war instead. The moon! There were still pictures of airplanes, and nobody doubted that the Fire Hew before it fell. But the moon! Could people really have gone there?

If they could have… If the people of Old Time could have gone to the moon but chose to blow themselves up instead… If they chose to do that, were they as smart as everybody always said they were? Or were they amazingly, unbelievably, dumb?

Dan stopped sharpening. He just stood there, file in one hand, arrow in the other. It wasn't against the law to think the people of Old Time were dumb-not quite. It wasn't against any religion to think they were dumb, either-not quite. But if you had a thought like that, you probably didn't want to admit it to anybody, either. People would call you a weirdo or a fruitcake or even a nonconformist. You didn't want to get hung with a label like that. It could stick to you for the rest of your life.

“What's happening, Dan?” Sergeant Chuck appeared behind him at just the wrong moment. Sergeants had a knack for doing that.

“Nothing, Sergeant.” Dan started scraping the point against the file again. “I just saw our machine gun. It's too much!” That should be safe.

And it was. “Wait till the Westsiders see it. Wait till they meet it up close and personal. They'll freak out, man-you better believe it.” Chuck smiled as if he could hardly wait. That was part of what made him a sergeant.

Dan was ready to go to war, but he wasn't in any big hurry about it. King Zev and his officers were. The next morning, right at sunup, Dan set his helmet on his head. He was just an archer-not a fancy kind of soldier at all. And yet he still wore a genuine U.S. Army steel helmet from the Old Time. If that didn't prove what a rich and powerful kingdom the Valley was. he didn't know what would.

The metal facing on his shield came from an Old Time car door. You could see where, once upon a time, it had said Falcon. Falcons were swift, fierce birds, so he thought that was a good omen. His shirt and trousers and boots were modern, but he thought his belt buckle came from the days before the Fire fell, too.

Captain Kevin made a little speech before his company set out. “When we march today, we're going to start marching up Victory Boulevard,” he said. “And every step we take till this war is done, we're going to stay on the road to victory. The Westsiders can't stop us, because we're right and they're wrong. We're tougher than they are, too. If they don't know that yet, they'll find out.”

Up Victory Boulevard they went, along with the rest of King Zev's soldiers. There had to be two or three thousand men in that army, maybe even more. They sang as they marched, alternating old songs like “Satisfaction” and “Hound Dog” with new ones like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our King.” Dan couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, but he enjoyed making noise.

Some of the companies marched south on the 405 when they got to the old freeway. They were going to attack the wall. Dan 's unit-and, he was excited to see, the machine gun as well-went south along Sepulveda Boulevard instead. They could support the troops on the 405, because the road and the freeway ran close together.

Still other Valley soldiers kept heading east. From what Dan heard, they would go south by way of Laurel Canyon. The thinking was that the Westsiders wouldn't be looking for a three-pronged attack. The City Council down there didn't know how strong and how determined the Valley was. Captain Kevin had said it best-they'd find out.

It was a hot day, like almost any summer day in the Valley. Wearing a steel hat sure didn't make it any cooler. Sweat ran down Dan 's face. “Drink plenty of water!” Captain Kevin called to his men. “'Eat some salt, too. But remember to drink. Nobody keels over before we go into action, right?”

“Yes, sir!” Dan shouted along with the rest of the men. He swigged from his canteen and crunched sea salt between his teeth. Sweat was wet and salty. It only stood to reason that salt and water put back what you sweated away.

For a while, stores and apartment buildings lined Sepulveda Boulevard. After the men passed the 101. though, those petered out. There were some houses on either side of the road. Their windows, empty now of glass, looked on the marching men like the eye sockets of so many skulls. Dan wished that hadn't crossed his mind. It gave him the creeps. His free hand twisted in a sign to hold evil away.

His shield and the helmet and his quiver and the long knife he wore on his belt and the pack with his rations in it all started to feel heavy as lead. Do I really need all this stuff? he wondered. Can I throw some of it away?

He tried to imagine what Sergeant Chuck would say if he did. Then he tried to imagine what the sergeant would do to him if he did. Whatever it was, it wouldn't be pretty. He hung on to his stuff.

Soldiers lined up to fill their canteens at a cistern. Without those, the Valley would have been in trouble. So would the Westside and all the other little countries that made up Greater LA. You had to save all the winter water you could, or else you'd run low in the summertime.

A medic poured brandy into each canteen-not too much. It kept down the runs. Anybody who improved the water too much caught it from his sergeant. After the men drank, they pressed on.

Along with her father and mother, Liz watched the Westside's soldiers march toward battle. They tramped west along Sunset toward the 405 and Sepulveda. Here as in the home timeline's Southern California, the very richest of the rich lived north of Sunset.

There were differences, though. In the home timeline, hardly any of those super-rich people had children who joined the army. Lots of young officers came from that group here. They were willing to put their lives on the line for what they believed in.

In other words, they were willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of a wall across the top of Sepulveda Pass. The more Liz thought about it, the crazier it seemed. She wondered what would happen if she said so to one of the soldiers in the muddy green, not-too-uniform uniforms. No, actually, she didn't wonder. She had a pretty good idea. She'd get arrested for being unpatriotic, and things would go downhill from there.

So, leeling like a hypocrite, she cheered and clapped her hands. One of the standard-bearers grinned at her. Why not? She was a pretty girl not far from his age. The Westside flag had a bear on it. Part of the bear seemed to come from the one on the old California state flag, part from the UCLA Bruin. That left it looking fierce and friendly at the same time, but the Westsiders didn't care.

“How big is this army?” Liz asked her father.

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “A couple of thousand men? Something like that.”

“Are they enough?”

Her father shrugged again. “We'll find out,” he said, which wasn't what she wanted to hear.

The cheering got louder. Here came Cal and his dog Pots. The beast looked as if it could eat half the Valley's army all by itself. Behind Cal came a horse that carried armor for Pots. The chunks of iron looked like the ones that had protected horses back in the days when knights were bold and life was nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes, Liz thought, remembering AP Euro.)

Cal waved his big white Stetson. “We'll get 'em!” he shouted to the people. “They won't come past us!”

“Ils ne passeront pas,” Dad murmured. “That goes back a couple of hundred years. I wonder if he knows.”

“Ask not what the Westside can do for you,” Cal added. “Ask what you can do for the Westside!”

Liz's father stirred again. That one rang a bell with her, too. She remembered grainy black-and-white video from the middle of the twentieth century. Even across almost a century and a half of changing hair and clothes styles, she remembered thinking how handsome John Kennedy was. Maybe he hadn't been the greatest President. Nobody'd cared much, then or later. An aura of glamour surrounded him to this day.

It did here, too. Kennedy half-dollars weren't just coins in this alternate. They were amulets. Only rich men had them, and mostly wore them on chains around their necks. The coins were credited with everything from magically stopping bullets-more irony, when you thought about it-to curing smallpox.

Smallpox… Liz rubbed at her left arm. In the home timeline, the disease was extinct. But she'd had to get vaccinated before she came to this alternate. People here vaccinated, too-they remembered that much. Not everybody got vaccinated, though, and the disease still broke out every now and then. The pocked faces of survivors were… appalling.

And people from the home timeline did a brisk business selling perfect copies of Kennedy halves. Yes, it was taking advantage of superstition. But the superstition would have been there whether they took advantage of it or not. In other alternates, Crosstime Traffic sold religious relics of several different kinds. What was the difference, really? Liz had trouble seeing any.

For that matter, what was the difference between superstition and religion generally? Lots of people had spilled lots of ink and killed lots of trees and pushed around lots of electrons trying to define the answer. So far, most of what they said boiled down to What I believe is religion, and what those foolish people over there believe is superstition.

There was no evidence that knocking on wood made the world less likely to go wrong. There was no evidence that praying in a church or synagogue or mosque made the world less likely to go wrong, either. That didn't stop people from doing both kinds of things. When it first became plain that science explained how things happened-not necessarily why, but how-better than religion did, lots of “experts,” from Karl Marx on down, predicted that religion would wither up and die.

It hadn't happened in the home timeline. It also hadn't happened in any high-tech alternate Crosstime Traffic had found. Most people weren't rational enough, or weren't rational often enough, to be satisfied believing this was all there was. By now, the “experts” doubted they ever would. That might prove as wrong as the earlier experts' certainty that religion would fail.

In low-tech alternates, religion was the only game in town. More and more, that was how things worked in this one. Liz had a hard time blaming the locals for feeling that way. What had science done for them here? Dropped them in the frying pan and turned up the heat, and that was about it.

Oh. the Westsiders still called themselves scientific. But they still called themselves democratic, too. That was another joke, except it wasn't funny.

A priest and a rabbi and a minister marched with the West-side army. No doubt a priest and a rabbi and a minister marched with the Valley's army, too. And no doubt both sides were sure God meant them to win. Some things didn't change no matter what alternate you were in-and no matter how much you wished they would.

Supply wagons made a dull close to a military parade, but no army was much good without them. Mules and horses twitched their ears as they trudged along. It wasn't their war, but people made the work anyway. They didn't like it, not that the teamsters cared. The draft animals got even less vote than the people had at the City Council meeting.

After the soldiers and the wagons passed, the Westsiders started drifting back toward their homes. “Show's over,” Liz's mother said. '“Now we hope we don't seen the soldiers for a while, 'cause if we do-”

“Something's gone wrong somewhere,” Dad finished for her.

“Well, yes.” Mom sent Dad a dirty look. Liz didn't blame her. She didn't like getting her lines stepped on, either.

The dirty look sailed over Dad's head the way a badly aimed arrow would have. He said, “Let's get back to the house.”

Getting back to the house, of course, meant walking back to the house. That was a couple of miles- Liz more readily thought of it as three kilometers-and took more than half an hour. Going from one place to another here was like traveling in the home timeline in one way. Ten minutes of travel was a short trip, half an hour was kind of medium, an hour was long, and two hours was a pain in the neck reserved for something that had better be special.

But how far you went in your time shrank drastically. Here you traveled on foot, or maybe on horseback. If you were very rich, you might have a carriage. Some bicycles survived, but their rubber tires didn't. With wooden tires, riding them was a good way to shake your kidneys loose.

And so you mostly didn't go more than four or five miles- six or eight kilometers-from where you lived. As they had in the days before trains and cars and planes, people lived their whole lives within twenty or thirty miles of where they were born. If this alternate didn't regain its technology, lots of little, very different peoples would sprout from the ruined tree trunk of the USA.

That was already starting to happen. The Westside and the Valley weren't just independent countries. People in both of them spoke English, but it wasn't quite the same English. People from the Valley had a nasal accent that made it pretty easy to pick them out from Westsiders by ear. In another few hundred years, the two dialects might turn into separate languages. Even if they didn't, it was pretty clear that people from Southern California would have trouble understanding people from the upper Midwest. And both those groups would have trouble with the language they spoke in the deep South.

Liz looked around to make sure no locals could overhear. When she saw they couldn't, she asked, “Is what I'm getting out of the library helping you figure out just where this alternate split off from the home timeline?”

“It will help. It's bound to,” her mother answered.

“It may take a while, though,” her father added. “I envy ancient historians. There's only so much for them to know. It's not like that when you get up into the twentieth century. You're drowning in data. It does seem plain that the breakpoint has to do with the Vietnam War, though.”

“We already knew that,” Liz said. “Or we were pretty sure, anyhow.”

Her father nodded. “It was always a good bet, since the big war started while the Vietnam War was going strong. But it still isn't obvious whether the U.S. escalation here scared the Russians enough to make them start throwing rockets, or whether the United States threw them first when we didn't like what Russia and China were doing.”

“Whoever shot first, an awful lot of people on both sides ended up dead.” Liz eyed this sorry version of the UCLA campus. “And there's been nothing but trouble ever since.”

“Nobody's going to tell you you're wrong, hon,” her father said. “At that, they got off lucky here. They got bombed back to the Middle Ages, but they didn't get bombed back to the Stone Age.”

“They didn't all get killed, either,” Mom said. “That happened in some alternates.”

Liz nodded. People really could be stupid. Just in case the home timeline didn't have enough examples of that, the alternates offered even more. People in the home timeline hadn't been stupid some ways. They hadn't tried blowing one another off the map with H-bombs, for instance. They were proud of that, and relieved about it, too.

Seeing what other people, people much too much like them, had done in different alternates should have made them prouder of escaping-and also more relieved. To some degree, it did. But only to some degree. Too many people in the home timeline still had axes to grind. Big wars seemed unlikely these days. Terrorist strikes, on the other hand…

“I've got a question,” Liz said.

“What?” her mother and father asked together.

“What happens if something now makes the home timeline split into two alternates?” Liz said. “They'd both have Crosstime Traffic in them. Which one would be the real home timeline?”

Mom and Dad looked at each other. They walked on for several steps without answering. At last, her father said, “If there are no other questions, class is dismissed.”

“Dad!” Liz said reproachfully.

“We're just historians. We can't deal with questions like that,” her mother said. “You need to talk to the chronophysicists. If anybody can tell you, they're the ones.”

“Talk to them at a convention, after they've got a few drinks under their belts,” Dad added. “If you get 'em when they're in the lab, they'll look wise and tell you things like that can't happen. I hope they're right. Everybody does.”

“How will we find out?” Liz asked.

“The same way people usually do, I bet,” her father answered. “The hard way.”

“Come on! Come on! Get moving!” Sergeant Chuck booted Dan in the seat of the pants. He didn't kick him hard enough to hurt, but it was plenty hard enough to wake him.

Chuck went on shouting and booting other soldiers awake. Dan yawned and stretched and looked around. The sun hadn't risen yet, but it would soon. It was already bright enough to see colors. Only a handful of the brightest stars still shone, and they faded out as he watched.

He pulled a square of hardtack and some smoked sausage from his pack. Some soldiers crumbled up their hardtack and fried it in bacon grease. He just crunched on his. You needed good teeth to do that. He had good teeth, and knew how lucky he was to have them. Wounded soldiers got ether before surgeons went to work on them. Ordinary people with toothaches? You needed to be rich to get knocked out before a dentist pulled a tooth that was driving you nuts.

“Everybody ready?” Captain Kevin called. “You better be ready, 'cause we're moving out!”

Dan stuffed a last chunk of sausage into his mouth. As he chewed on it, he probably looked like a hamster with its cheek pouches full. He didn't care. He kind of liked hamsters. They were a lot cuter than rats and mice. They didn't have pointy noses, and they didn't have long, naked tails, either.

Old men and women said their grandparents said there hadn't been any wild hamsters before the Fire fell. There also hadn’t been any wild iguanas or parrots. And lakes and ponds hadn't had any piranhas in them. Dan wasn't sure he believed that. Wasn't it like saying there'd been a time without possums and starlings and cabbage butterflies? If there had been a time like that, nobody remembered it now.

“Form up!'“ the captain shouted. “Chances are we'll be in action later on today.”

The soldiers who were about Dan 's age hurried into place. They were as eager as he was. Older men, men who'd gone to war before, didn't move so fast. Dan thought that was because they were old. That it might be because they'd already seen battle and didn't much care for it never crossed his mind.

As carefully as if handling gold and precious jewels, the machine-gun crew loaded their lovely weapon onto the pack horse's back. Extra ammunition went onto another horse. When the men waved to Kevin, he got the company moving.

“Be alert-the enemy may have pushed scouts forward,” he warned.

That made Dan try to look every which way at once. Old Sepulveda gave scouts plenty of places to hide. One could lurk in any of those dead houses, watching the Valley soldiers with field glasses. But if one was, how would he get word back to his commanders? This wasn't the Old Time. He wouldn't have a television or a radio or a telephone handy.

Here and there, people did still use telegraphs. Could a scout have strung wire out behind him so he could click away and pass on information like that? Dan supposed it wouldn't be impossible, but he didn't think it would be easy.

And how much did it matter? As they started to march, they moved uphill, toward the top of the pass. The Westsiders were already looking down into the Valley. If they didn't know King Zev's army was moving toward them, they were even dumber than Dan thought. Could you be that dumb and live? He doubted it.

That set him looking toward the top of the pass. He already knew there was a wall across the 405. Was there one across Sepulveda, too? Squint as he would, he couldn't tell. Sepulveda was lower than the freeway, and didn't show up so well against the sky.

Something howled, up ahead in the distance. The noise seemed to echo from the brush-covered walls of the pass. The hair at the back of his neck stood up. “Is that a coyote?” he asked, trying not to sound scared.

“If it is, it's a coyote the size of the Coliseum,'' Sergeant Chuck answered. The saying reached back to Old Times. The Coliseum didn't exist anymore. One of the bombs that got L.A. and ended the good days came down not far from it.

“Does Cal really have a dog the size of a house?” Yes, Dan was nervous.

“I don't know. We'll see what comes out of the tunnel, that's all,” Chuck said. Old Sepulveda went through a cliff near the highest part of the pass. The Westside held both ends of the tunnel. Dan would have liked it better if the border went through the middle. Then either side could have blocked the other from using that way through. As things were, the Westside had the edge.

We've got to beat them, that's all, he thought. Then we'll hold both ends of the tunnel, and let's see how they like that.

A cannon boomed. He thought the sound came from near the barricade the Westsiders had built. It was a black-powder boom, not the sharper crack of Old Time explosives. If you were on the wrong end of a cannonball, though, you wouldn't care one way or the other.

“Come on! Step it up!” Captain Kevin shouted. “Our friends, our neighbors, are in action. We'll help them out! Hurrah for King Zev!”

“Hurrah for King Zev!” Dan yelled. Along with the rest of Kevin 's company, he trotted forward.

Another boom, this one from near the mouth of the tunnel. Dan could see this cannonball flying through the air. He ducked. He couldn't help himself. He felt ashamed till he realized the other Valley soldiers were ducking, too. The cannonball hissed over his head and smashed into an empty house with a noise like a thunderclap. Startled crows flew up, screeching.

“Spread out!” Kevin and Chuck yelled the same thing at the same time. “That way, they won't be able to get so many of you with one round,” Chuck added.

Oh, boy, Dan thought. It didn't mean they wouldn't be able to get him. It just meant they'd have to work a little harder, or he'd have to be a little less lucky. He wished he hadn't thought of that.

There wasn't a whole lot of room to spread out in, either. The cracked asphalt of Old Sepulveda and the wider expanse of the 405 were the only good routes through the pass. Wreckage and undergrowth clogged the rest.

That horrible howl came again. “Holy moley!” somebody shouted, pointing south. “There he is!”

The dog had to be enormous to be noticed from that far away. Was it really as big as a house? Dan wasn't sure. It was plenty big enough-he was sure of that. Some Westside soldiers ran forward with it, to guide it toward the Valley men. Then, as it saw them or smelled them or did whatever it did to know they were there, it ran on by itself. They just wore uniforms, while it had on armor like a cavalry charger's. It easily outdistanced them even so.

Dan reached back over his shoulder for an arrow. A heartbeat later, he started to laugh at himself. As if an arrow would do anything to a creature like that even if by some accident it hit! He wanted to run. The fearsome Westside dog could bite him in half with one chomp.

A couple of Valley soldiers did run. Their sergeants swore at them, which didn't make them stop. They'd get in trouble later on. They had to think that was better than getting eaten right now.

Then Dan heard a sharp, repeated hammering noise: bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! The reports were bigger and louder than any he'd ever heard from an Old Time rifle. He looked around. The machine-gun crew had got their weapon down from the pack horse. They were banging away at the Westside monster dog as if their lives depended on it-and they did.

The dog-monster's growls changed to yelps of agony. The beast's armor would have turned arrows, maybe even musket balls. Dan didn't know about ordinary Old Time rifle bullets. He did know the armor had zero chance against the enormous slugs the.50-caliber machine gun spat.

In spite of its wounds, the dog was brave. It kept coming up Sepulveda till it couldn't move any more. It didn't finally go down till it got within a couple of hundred yards of the Valley soldiers. By then, Dan could clearly see the holes the bullets had chewed in its armor, and the blood that poured from the holes in the animal's hide. His stomach wanted to turn over-it wasn't pretty.

That cannon up near the mouth of the tunnel boomed once more. The big iron ball it fired clanged off a boulder not far from the machine gun and crazily ricocheted away. One ol the men in the gun crew had some Old Time field glasses. He peered through them, then pointed. The machine gun started banging again.

Dan had no field glasses. Some of the machine-gun rounds were tracers, though. He could see where they went. The red flashes of fire led his eye straight to the cannon. The Old Time machine gun had at least as much range as the modern artillery piece. One after another, the men serving the cannon fell.

When the machine gun slopped shooting, some of the West-side artillerymen stood up. Replacements ran forward to help them fire the gun. The Valley machine gunner with the binoculars was waiting for that. As soon as the enemy gun crew was complete again, the machine gun roared back to life. More Westsiders went down. Dan didn't think they would rise till Judgment Day.

“Let's go!'“ Captain Kevin yelled. “They won't give us any trouble now!”

Cheering, the Valley men ran forward. Dan charged past the enormous dog's corpse. Blood puddled underneath it. Flies buzzed up in annoyance as the soldiers went past. They'd already started feeding on the body.

A few shots rang out from the Westsiders. They must have counted on the dog and the cannon to hold back the Valley troops. Now that that wasn't working, they didn't seem to have another plan. The pitiless machine gun picked off their men at a range from which they couldn't answer.

Some of the Valley soldiers started climbing up to the 405. Dan was one of them. What he saw when he got up there made him whoop and stomp his feet. The Valley men had outflanked the wall, which didn't stretch all the way across the pass. And the Westsiders were running as fast as they could.