The Valley-Westside War

Three

Sound really carried here. That was one of the first things Liz had noticed about this alternate. It had much less background noise than the home timeline did. No streets and freeways full of cars here. No TVs. No radios. Only a handful of windup record players. No factories, not really.

And so, when the fighting in the Sepulveda Pass got going, Liz and her family could try to figure out what was going on from what they heard. So could everybody else in Westwood.

One particular set of bangs made her father frown. “Somebody's got a heavy machine gun,” he said. “For a place like this. that's a very nasty weapon.”

“It's a very nasty weapon anywhere,” her mother said.

“Well, yeah.” Dad nodded. “But we've got even worse ones in the home timeline. Here, it's liable to be king of the hill. King of the pass, I mean.”

“Do you think it belongs to the Westside or the Valley?” Liz asked.

“Yes,” Dad said, deadpan.

“Thanks a lot.” She gave him a dirty look. “Which one, please?”

“Well, I didn't see it in Cal's parade,” her father answered. “If he had one, he would have been proud to show it off, I think.”

“If the Valley has it…” Liz's voice trailed away.

“If the Valley has it, the people here were really dumb to go to war,” Dad said. “Unless their hat has a rabbit in it, too.”

“Do you think it does?” she asked, adding, “I don't want anything to happen to UCLA.”

After some thought, Dad shrugged. “Hon, I just don't know. If they've got more stuff than they were showing, I haven't heard about it. But I don't know if I would. I'm just a tradesman, after all. If the big bosses have any brains, they'll keep secrets from people like me.”

“If the big bosses had any brains, they would've known the Valley's got a heavy machine gun, right?” Liz said.

Her father spread his hands. “Can't argue with you. I wish I could. I've never thought King Zev was real smart, but it's amazing how brilliant you look when you can shoot your enemies and they can't shoot you back.”

“Right,” Liz said.

When she went out into what had been West wood Village to shop for produce, everything seemed normal enough. People weren't paying much attention to the bangs and booms coming out of the north-or, if they were, they weren't letting on.

Apricots. Peaches. Oranges. Lemons. Avocados. Eggs. Chickens. Live baby pigs. Fish-some smoked, some salted, some you'd buy if it smelled okay. The sellers-mostly women-sat under awnings or Old Time beach umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun. Seeing what amounted to a farmers' market just south of the UCLA campus made Liz sad.

In 1967, Westwood Village had probably been the coolest part of L.A., the way Melrose was a generation later. In the home timeline, it got commercial. Then it got grimy. Then it got redeveloped and turned cool again, even if not quite so cool as the first time around. Then the cycle started over.

In this alternate, time might as well have stopped when the bombs came down. And after it stopped, it might have started running backwards. Without running water to fight them, fires flattened a lot of the shops and restaurants and apartment buildings that had stood in the Village. The buildings here now-the house where she was staying included-were built from rubble and wreckage. The market had sprung up in one of the fire-born open spaces.

“How much for those avocados?” Liz asked an old lady in a broad-brimmed straw hat-not quite a sombrero, but close.

“'Dime apiece,” she answered. “Three for a quarter.”

Liz had all she could do not to giggle. Old Time money still circulated here. So did newer coins on the same standard. Prices were ridiculously cheap, at least by the home timeline's standards. Liz had had to learn about pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters before she came here. In the home timeline, a dollar-the smallest coin around-wouldn't come close to buying what a penny bought here. And a Benjamin -a hundred dollars-was worth somewhere between a dime and a quarter.

No matter how cheap things seemed, you couldn't take the first offer. That was an insult. “I'll give you a quarter for five,” Liz said. “They aren't very big.” She'd had to practice sounding that snotty.

The old lady let out a squawk. She told Liz what a snippy, rude thing she was. All this was as formal as a dance. They settled on four avocados for twenty-five cents, the way they'd both known they would. But social rules had to be followed even when they made no sense-maybe especially when they made no sense.

More bangs and booms came from the north. “Are those getting closer?” Liz asked. That wasn't in the rules about haggling, but it was liable to be more important.

After cocking her head to one side to listen, the avocado seller said, “I sure hope not. That would be a stone bummer.”

“Yeah, wouldn't it?” Liz said. She wasn't sure, but she did think the noises from the north were louder than they had been. Maybe that was just her jumpy imagination talking. She could hope it was, anyhow.

Carrying the avocados in a cloth sack, she wandered through the market looking for a chicken to buy. Meat here didn't come neatly packaged in a refrigerated case at the store. If you wanted chicken stew, you bought a live chicken and whacked off its head with a hatchet. Then, after it stopped spewing blood and thrashing-which could take much longer than Liz would have imagined before she watched the first time-you had to pluck it and clean it. Cleaning it was a polite way to say cutting it open and taking out the guts and the lungs and whatever else you didn't want to eat.

The first time Liz helped do that, she got sick. She could handle it now, but it didn't thrill her-not even close. So she dawdled instead of buying a bird right away. Carrying one back to the house by its feet while it clucked and squawked wasn't much fun, either.

Hoofbeats drummed up the road from the west. That was more interesting than looking at one more beady-eyed chicken, so Liz turned to see what was going on. A mounted soldier galloped his horse toward the market. Liz had seen the look on his face before, back in the home timeline. People who'd just been in a traffic accident had that same air of stunned disbelief.

“What's happening, man?” somebody called.

“They beat us.” The soldier's voice was eerily calm, the way those of accident survivors often were. “They beat us,” he repeated, as if he'd forgotten he'd said the same thing a moment earlier. “They rolled us up. That stinking machine gun of theirs…” He shuddered. “They're coming. We'll try to stop them, but they're coming.”

Before anyone could ask him more questions, he rode on. He left chaos in his wake. Men groaned. Women screamed and wailed. Some of the buyers and sellers decided they didn't want to hang around anymore. Several of them looked to the north as if they expected a million Valley soldiers to follow hard on the horseman's heels.

That didn't happen, of course. Little by little, the ones who stayed realized it wouldn't. But by the time Liz bought a mean-looking chicken (so she wouldn't mind so much when the bird got it in the neck), several more Westside soldiers made it back from the fighting in the pass. Some rode horses. Others were on bicycles with the wooden tires they used here instead of rubber.

They all told the same story, near enough. They would have easily beaten the men from the Valley if not for that machine gun. With it, King Zev's soldiers could do no wrong. “They could kill us from ranges where we couldn't even touch them,” said a man on a bike. “How are you supposed to fight a war like that?”

“Why didn't Cal know they had it?” somebody asked.

“Beats me,” the soldier answered. “He didn't, though-never in a million years.” He paused, then added one more telling detail: “Pots is dead. That gun chewed up his armor like it wasn't there. Chewed him up, too.”

People moaned and wept when they heard that. The monster mutant dog had been a symbol of Westside strength for years. What did he symbolize now? The collapse of Westside strength? It sure looked that way to Liz.

Sack of avocados in one hand, chicken legs in the other, her head full of news, she headed back toward the house. She was glad to give her mother the chicken. She wasn't so glad to pass the news along.

Mom's mouth tightened. “I was afraid of that. Remember how your father said a heavy machine gun would be big trouble?”

“Well, he was right.” Liz didn't say that every day. She got on well with her father, but she didn't always agree with him- not even close. She paused, gulped, and asked, “What do we do if… if the Valley soldiers come here?”

“Try to stay out of their way,” her mother answered. “Try-not to make them notice us. Try not to get in trouble. Try to protect UCLA, if we can.”

“How do we do that if we're doing all those other things, too?” Liz asked. This time, Mom didn't answer. Liz wondered why. She thought it was a mighty good question.

Dan was over the top of Sepulveda Pass. The wall the Westsiders had run up-the wall that had started the war-lay behind him. Prisoners the Valley troops had taken were already starting to knock it down.

“All downhill from here!” Captain Kevin shouted. The men in his company cheered.

The captain meant it both literally and figuratively. Dan figured the fight would get easier from here on out, too. And it was downhill from here, all the way into Westwood and Brentwood, the Westsiders' most important northern centers.

Not all the enemy soldiers had given up and run away. Somebody fired a musket from behind a boulder. A cloud of black-powder smoke told where he hid. The bullet hit the asphalt maybe twenty feet from Dan and ricocheted away.

“Shall we hunt him down, sir?” Sergeant Chuck asked.

Captain Kevin shook his head. “No. It would only waste our time, and that's what he wants. Spread the men out so they're harder to hit, that's all. Once we finish taking the Westside apart, this guy will have to surrender, too.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. Dan didn't think he liked the order, but he obeyed it. Before long, the musketeer fired again. He missed again, too. A musket would shoot farther than a bow, but it was less accurate. If he'd had an Old Time rifle, now… But he didn't, and Dan was glad he didn't.

Before long, the Valley men came to another barricade across the 405. This one was made of rubble, and plainly brand new. Some Westside soldiers crouched behind it, aiming to stop the troops from the Valley-or, more likely, to delay them, anyhow. A couple of the Westsiders did have Old Time weapons. They opened up too soon, though, and warned the Valley men. Dan and his comrades scrambled off the freeway into the brush to either side. If they had to work their way past the men with the dangerous weapons, then they did, that was all.

And then the machine gun started hammering at the Westsiders again. With that gun reaching for you, you had to be crazy, or at least crazy-brave, to expose yourself to the death it spat.

Some of them were. They held their ground and tried to shoot back. But the machine gun was too much for most of them to face. Some of its bullets even punched through the junk they'd piled up to protect themselves. So was it any wonder that a lot of them ran away to fight somewhere else another time-or maybe just to save their own lives?

Wonder or not, one of the Westsiders dashed past Dan without knowing or caring that he was close by. The enemy soldier couldn't have been more than a year or two older than he was himself. Dan set an arrow on his bowstring, drew, and let fly all in one smooth motion. The string scraped across his leather wristguard.

The arrow caught the Westsider in his right calf. He went down with a wail. Dan had aimed at his chest. Still, a hit was a hit. Drawing his shortsword, Dan ran forward. “Surrender!” he yelled. “You're my prisoner!”

“It hurts!” the Westsider said. “It hurts!” He hardly even knew Dan was there. Pain twisted his face. Blood ran from the wound- Dan could smell it as well as seeing it. All at once, gulping, he was less proud of what he'd done.

“You give up?” Dan said roughly, and then, “You better give up. You reach for that musket, it's the last dumb thing you'll ever do.”

“It hurts!” the Westsider wailed again. After that, he blinked and seemed to realize he had company. He looked from Dan to the musket he'd dropped. “Stupid thing isn't loaded anyway.”

He could say that, which didn't make it true. “Do you surrender?” Dan demanded. “This is your last chance.” That sounded tough, but what would he do if the Westsider said no? Kill him in cold blood? He wasn't sure he could.

He didn't have to find out, because the Westsider answered, “Yeah, I surrender. What else can I do? Will you put a bandage on my leg?”

“Sure,” Dan said. “Want me to push the arrow through first? Otherwise, the surgeon will have to cut for it, and I don't think we've got ether for prisoners.”

“Oh, wow.” The captured enemy sounded bleak. Dan would have, too, were it his leg. Only luck that it wasn't, luck and a heavy machine gun. If one of those slugs had hit this guy, he wouldn't be freaking out about a nice clean wound. He'd likely be dead. Dan had gone past some Westsiders who'd stopped .50-caliber rounds. Even if the bullet didn't hit a vital spot, the shock of getting smacked by something moving that fast could kill.

“Well, do you?” Dan asked when the Westsider didn't give him a straight answer.

“Yeah. go ahead.” The other youngster set himself.

But before Dan could, Sergeant Chuck said, “Come on, kid-get moving. Throw his musket some place where he can't grab it, and get yourself in gear. He won't be your personal slave, even if you did shoot him. You're here to fight. We've got other people to clean up the mess afterwards.”

“Okay, Sarge.” Dan wasn't sorry to have an excuse to get to his feet. He knew what you were supposed to do about an arrow wound, but he'd never tried it before. He didn't much want to, either. Hurting somebody on purpose, even if you were helping at the same time, seemed harder than shooting at the same person had been. That was crazy, but it was true. He nodded to the Westsider. “Uh, good luck.”

“Thanks a bunch,” the wounded soldier said. Dan grabbed the musket and flung it into the brush. The Westsider wasn't likely to go after it.

“Let's move.” Chuck gave Dan a shove. Dan got moving. The sergeant asked, “First one you shot?”

“First one I know I did, anyway,” Dan answered.

“Yeah, sometimes you can't tell,” Chuck agreed. “How do you feel about it?”

Dan wanted to brag about how heroic he was. He found that the words wouldn't come out of his mouth. What did come out was, “I almost barfed.” He waited for the tough sergeant to laugh at him.

But Chuck only nodded. “Well, that's honest.” he said. “I felt the same way the first time I did it. People who aren't soldiers think war's a game. The ones who have to fight know better.”

“Some soldiers brag about what they do,” Dan said.

“Most of the ones who brag haven't really done it,” Chuck replied. “Some of the others…” His mouth tightened. “Well, some people get off on hurting others. They're good killers. They usually aren't good soldiers. There's a difference.”

“I guess.” Dan hadn't really thought about that before.

A few hundred yards ahead, some Westsiders were making another stand. They couldn't hope to stop the Valley army now-or they were flipping out if they thought they could. But they could slow down the advance through the pass. That would let more of their own men get away.

“Come on! Come on!” Captain Kevin shouted. “We have to outflank them. They'll be sorry they tried to mess with us then. They-” He broke off with a howl of pain, clutching at his right upper arm.

“The captain's hit!” Chuck shouted. He and Dan weren't especially near the wounded Valley officer.

One of Kevin 's lieutenants spoke up: “We have to go on! Our medics will see to the captain!” That deep voice had to belong to Hank. He made a pretty good number two man. Dan had never thought of him as a commander, but now he had the chance to show what he could do.

For the moment, he did what Captain Kevin had been on the point of doing. He led the Valley men around the makeshift scrape of earth and rubble the enemy had thrown up. He didn't wait for the heavy machine gun to make the Westsiders keep their heads down. Instead, he used riflemen and musketeers for the same job. They did what needed doing, too. There weren't that many defenders, which helped.

When the Westside soldiers saw the Valley men were starting to slip around behind them, they fled. Dan shot at one of them. He wasn't too disappointed when his arrow missed. He did think he aimed honestly-he didn't want to let his kingdom down or anything. But he still wasn't sorry not to be responsible for hurting somebody else.

Some of the other Valley men were hurting the Westsiders. Dan watched a man go down, clutching at his side. A Valley soldier ran over to him, picked up a loose chunk of asphalt, and bashed in his head. “For the captain!” the Valley man yelled. He kicked the Westsider-who had to be dead after that-and ran on.

If they'd won, they would have done the same thing to us, Dan thought. He knew that was true. The Westsiders wouldn't have turned Cal 's huge, horrible dog loose on anybody they loved. Even so, seeing what war was all about and what it did to people didn't make him happy.

Then a bullet cracked past his head. It came so close that he felt, or thought he felt, the wind of its passage. While he was being sorry war was so savage, somebody on the other side was doing his level best to kill him. And the enemy soldier's level best was almost good enough.

If the Westsiders were going to fight, how could he do anything else? He saw no way. They were probably asking themselves the same question about King Zev 's troops, but Dan couldn't do anything about that.

He'd been fighting and scrambling forward all day long. Even so, he realized, he wasn't nearly so hot and sweaty as he would have been back home. People said the weather on the Westside was cooler than it was in the Valley. They talked about the sea breeze. Dan had never seen the sea. He knew it was there, but he'd never gone down Topanga to see it. That was an all-day journey. A lot of the time, what people said was a bunch of bull. Here, though, it looked as if those people- whoever they were-knew what they were talking about. It really was cooler once you started coming down the south side of Sepulveda Pass.

“Jeep! Jeep! Jeep!” A scrub jay yelled at him from a bush. He almost jumped out of his skin. Scrub jays lived in the Valley, too-he saw them all the time. But he hadn't noticed this one till it started screeching. The way ice ran through him told him how jumpy he was.

Firing picked up again. The pass widened out as it got lower. There wouldn't be many more places for the Westsiders to make a stand before the Valley men came to Brentwood.

A cannon boomed. The smoke that poured from the muzzle looked like thick fog. Dan saw fog every so often in the Valley. There was supposed to be more of it down below the pass. The cannonball slammed down onto the 405, scattering chips of asphalt that probably bit like bullets. It bounced up the freeway, not much bigger than a softball.

A Valley soldier stuck out a foot to try to stop it. “Don't do that!” Sergeant Chuck screamed. The startled man jerked back his foot just in time. The cannonball bounced on.

“Why shouldn't he stop it, Sarge?” Dan asked.

“Because he wouldn't, that's why,” Chuck answered. “It's still going fast, and it's solid iron. If it hit him in the foot, they'd likely have to amputate, 'cause it'd smash him to the devil and back again.”

“Really?” Dan had trouble believing it. Had he stood where the other soldier was, chances were he would have done the same thing. He eyed Chuck. Was the sergeant pulling his leg?

But Chuck solemnly raised his right hand. “By King Zev's name, I swear it's true,” he said. “I haven't seen it, but I know somebody who did. He wouldn't lie, either-he's not that kind.”

“Okay, Sarge.” Dan believed that Chuck believed it. Whether it was true… Who would want to find out by trying it?

The Westside cannon roared again. A horse shrieked and toppled, spouting blood. The man on the horse yelled, too, when its weight came down on his leg. Dan had been amazed to find out how much blood a man's body held. A horse's held much more, and it was just as red, just as scary.

From behind the advancing Valley soldiers, the heavy machine gun started up again. Those big, nasty slugs probed for the cannon crew. The machine gun had at least as much range as the miserable modern gun. The muzzle-loading cannon fired one ball at a time. After that, the crew had to go through a fancy dance to reload it. It got off maybe a round a minute. Maybe. The machine gun, on the other hand…

One after another, Westside artillerymen went down. The cannon stopped shooting. The Westsiders brought up horses to haul it away so it could fight somewhere else later on. The machine gunners waited till the Westsiders hitched the horses to the gun carriage. Then, cruelly efficient, they shot them down.

“You hate to do that,” Chuck said. “The poor horses don't know what's going on. This isn't their fault. But if they can help the bad guys hurt you…”

Down there in the Westsiders' shattered lines, were they calling the machine gunners the bad guys? They probably were. The gun had done more to smash their hopes than the rest of the Valley army put together.

Bang!… Bang! Bang! That wasn't a machine gun. But it was an Old Time rifle, fired from the Westside position. Dan needed a few heartbeats to figure out what was going on. Then he did. The Westsider was trying to pick off the machine gunners the way the Valley men had nailed the artillery crew.

He tried, yeah, but he didn't have much luck. The machine gun was just at or just past the extreme range of his piece. His bullets could reach about that far, but not with any accuracy. And he could also fire only one round at a time, though he managed several shots a minute.

When the machine gun answered, it put out a lot of lead. If one bullet didn't get the rifleman, the next would, or the one after that. A Westsider threw up his hands and then flopped down limply over the rough barricade behind which he was shooting. Was that the troublesome fellow with the rifle?

The machine gunners must have thought so. They kept shooting to make sure he'd been killed. Dan watched the body jerk several times. By the time the Valley machine-gun crew turned the weapon in a new direction, the Westsider had to be dead.

Another Westside soldier scrambled over the barrier to rescue the valuable Old Time rifle. The machine gunners shot him before he could get his hands on it.

“Serves him right,”' Sergeant Chuck said. “There's a time to show how brave you are, and there's a time to use your brains. You don't go sticking your head in the cougar's mouth, not more than once you don't.”

Dan nodded. The machine gun was much more deadly than any cougar ever born. Cougars would have climbed trees to get away from the Westsiders' mutant dog. The gun had killed it easy as you please.

“Oh, wow!” Somebody pointed ahead. “Look at all the houses and stuff.”

Some of those buildings were too big and fancy to be houses. UCLA was down there somewhere. Its bear had gone into the Westside flag- Dan knew that much. It was supposed to be a store of wisdom, too.

How much good had its wisdom done the Westside. though? If the people who lived there were wise, would they have picked a fight with the Valley? Dan didn't think so. The Westsiders were probably sorry now. Being sorry was easy, but it usually came too late to do any good.

The other soldier pointed again, this time to the southwest. “Oh, wow!” he repeated. “Is that the ocean? Can it be?”

Dan's eyes followed the man's outstretched index finger. Off in the distance, where things got blue and hazy, the land did seem to end. Something even bluer lay beyond it. The Pacific? “The sea,” Dan murmured, awe prickling through him. “The sea!”

In a moment, all the Valley soldiers were chanting it: “The sea! The sea!” How many of them had ever seen it before? Maybe a few of the officers had, and some who came from widely traveled merchant families. But for most of the Valley men, the sea was only a vast mystery-or it had been, till now.

One reason they could see it was that a bomb had flattened Santa Monica. Whatever tall buildings had stood there were nothing but melted stumps now. Dan wondered why no bomb had come down on the rest of the Westside. That would have taken care of those people once and for all.

Did the Westsiders feel the same way about the Valley? Wondering whether they did never occurred to Dan.

More and more panicky Westside soldiers ran through West-wood Village. All of them went from north to south. None seemed interesting in fortifying the area against an attack from the Valley. Was that good news or bad? Liz wasn't sure.

“I think we're going to get occupied,” her father said.

Liz thought so, too. “What will the Valley soldiers do?” she asked nervously.

“Well, they won't shoot up the village and smash things with cannonballs,” her mother answered. “If the Westsiders tried to make a stand here, they would.”

As the sun set, somebody knocked on the Mendozas ' door. Dad opened it. There stood Cal in his trademark white Stetson and plaid jacket. A couple of bodyguards with rifles followed him. “You boys can wait outside,” he told them as he stepped over the threshold.

“But-” one of the guards began.

“It's okay,” Cal said flatly. “If I have to worry about these people, no place is safe for me.” As Liz's father closed the door, Cal muttered, “And maybe no place is. The way things are going…”

“What can we do for you, sir?” Dad asked.

“I hear you have a way to keep things safe for people,” Cal said. “Is that so?”

A stout safe, one that looked as if it came from the Old Time, was hidden in a storeroom. In fact, it came from the home timeline. The locals wouldn't be able to break into it… though they might torture the combination out of someone. Dad could also take stuff back to the home timeline if he had to or wanted to.

He picked his words with care: “There's safe, and then there's safe. If someone puts a gun to my head, I won't get killed to hang on to something for somebody else.”

“No, no. I understand that,” Cal said. “But within reason, you can, right? And you can make things hard to find, right?”

“Sometimes. If things work out the way they should.” Dad was playing it as cagey as he could. Liz didn't blame him a bit.

Cal didn't seem to be fussy. “Here.” He thrust a large leather pouch at Liz's father. “Hang on to this till I can come back and get it. I hope that won't be long. I hope I can rally our forces and lead us to the victory we deserve. I aim to try.” He suddenly ran out of bluster. “But you never can tell. Hang on to it, like I said. If I don't come back for it, I'll see if I can find some kind of way for you to get it back to me. Is that a deal?”

“That's a deal,” Dad said. It wasn't one that committed him to much.

“Good!” Cal stuck out his hand. Dad shook it. Cal made as if to tip his hat, then went out the door and hurried away. He and his bodyguards trotted around a corner. After that, Liz couldn't see them anymore.

“What did he give you?” she asked her father.

Dad hefted the pouch. “A lot of what's in here has to be gold. Nothing else that takes up so little room is so heavy.” He grinned wryly. “Oh, it could be lead, but I don't think so.”

“Why don't you look?” Liz said. “He didn't tell say you couldn't or anything. He didn't even ask you not to.”

She watched Dad fight temptation and lose. The expressions chasing one another across his face were pretty funny. “You're right,” he said after maybe ten seconds. “Let's go in the kitchen, where we can spread stuff out.”

Mom was chopping up tomatoes when Liz and Dad came in. Everything here got done by hand. Liz had found out about chickens the hard way. But there were no food processors here. No fancy bread machines, either. Making food was work, a lot of work. Keeping it fresh was even more work-no refrigeration, either. If you didn't want to eat it the day you made it, or the day after that, you had to salt it or smoke it or dry it.

“What have you got there?” Mom asked. She seemed glad of any excuse to knock off for a while.

“ Cal gave it to Dad,” Liz answered.

“He's heading into, ah, political exile,” Dad added. “He hopes he'll be back, but he's not making like Douglas Mac-Arthur.”

“He'd better not, not with that hat and that coat,” Mom said. “So what did he leave behind?”

“We're going to find out.” Dad opened the pouch and spilled its contents onto a table with a Formica top and iron legs with peeling chrome trim: an Old Time relic. Some of the gold that spilled out was old coins. Some was rings and bracelets and necklaces. Some was just lumps, where a goldsmith had melted stuff down.

“So you're deeper into the banking business,” Mom said to Dad.

“Looks that way,” he agreed.

“Anything else in the pouch? Hope, maybe? “ Liz had been studying Greek mythology, and it rubbed off.

“I'll find out.” Her father reached inside. He pulled out a folded sheet of paper. It was modern, not from the Old Time. Ironically, that meant it would last better. It wasn't cheap wood pulp that started turning brown the day it got made. Instead, it came from old rags, the way paper had when it was just invented.

As Dad turned it over, Liz saw a wax seal and some upside-down writing on the other side. “What does it say?” she asked.

“ 'Open only if you know I'm dead,'“ Dad answered.

“Are you going to pay attention to that?” Mom asked.

He thought about it, then nodded. He didn't look very happy, though. “I guess I am,” he said. “ Cal might come back and get his stuff.”

“Yeah, and then you wake up.” Mom wasn't sarcastic very often, but she could be dangerous when she let fly.

As if to underscore what she said, bursts of gunfire came from the north-from not nearly far enough away. Screams said somebody'd been wounded. Running feet and galloping hooves added to the racket outside. As far as Liz could tell, they were all going from north to south. If those weren't more Westsiders getting out while the getting was good, Liz would have been amazed.

“See?” Mom said.

Dad spread his hands, palms up. “This is now. Who knows what things will look like next year, or even next week? Maybe the Valley's machine gun will break down. Maybe it'll run out of ammo. Or maybe the Westsiders will scrounge one of their own. Cal won't be happy if he comes back and finds out we've been snooping.”

“You're no fun,” Liz's mother said. “Besides, can't we match the seal and put it back so he never finds out we peeked?”

“It's not as simple as you make it sound,” Dad answered. Liz happened to know he was right. Sealing wax was low-tech, which didn't make it a bad security device. Oh, you could beat it. If you took a mold of the existing seal before you broke it, you could replace it with one that looked the same. If you didn't put the replacement in just the same spot, though, somebody with sharp eyes or a suspicious nature could tell what you'd been up to.

“Hold it!” Somebody out there yelled. Was that the nasal whine of a Valley accent? The man went on, “Don't you move, or you'll be sorry!”

Somebody must have moved, because a musket boomed a second later. And an anguished cry from right in front of the house said whoever had moved was sorry now.

“Search that man!” ordered the fellow who'd warned against moving.

“For sure, Sergeant!” That had to be a Valley soldier talking. They were here in Westwood Village, then. Cal had got out just in time. A moment later, the soldier said, “He's got silver!”

“Well, save me my share,” the sergeant said.

“I wouldn't hold out on you-honest.” The soldier sounded offended.

“Okay, Dan. Keep your shirt on.” The sergeant, by contrast, seemed to be doing his best not to laugh. He went on, “That guy need a doctor?”

“Nope,” Dan answered. “You got him in the neck, and he's dead. Nice shot.”

“Thanks.”

They both seemed casual about death. How much of it had they seen before? How much had they dealt out? Liz's stomach did a slow lurch as she thought about that.

And then her heart leaped into her mouth, because the soldier- Dan -was banging on the front door and yelling, “Open up! Open up in the name of King Zev!”