The Wanderer

Chapter Thirty-one

The saucer students heard four rapid horn-beeps which came winging back through air heavy with the sour, acrid fumes of burnt-over land — and reeking more than ever since a hot, damp wind had set in from the southeast. Overhead the sun was hot but there was a big black cloudbank to the south.

Hunter brought the sedan to a stop behind the Corvette, which had just topped a rise, the road passing between two natural rock gateposts some fifteen feet high.

Doc was standing in the seat, studying the terrain ahead. He looked just a little like a pirate, with the brim of his black hat pulled down in back but turned up sharply in front. He reached out his right hand, and Rama Joan put the field glasses into it. He resumed his scanning, using the seven-power instrument. Rama Joan and Ann stood up, too.

Hunter stopped the sedan’s motor, set the brake, and as the school bus drew up behind them third in line, he and Margo got out and hurried forward until they could see, too.

In front of them a slope stretched downward for a quarter of a mile in gentle undulations to a broad-ditched flat, then rose again, though not so high.

The slope was black to the left, dusty greenish-brown to the right. Monica Mountainway went down it in swinging curves, crossing and recrossing the demarcation line between the burned and the unburned.

Toward the bottom, almost on the demarcation line, it passed three white buildings surrounded by a wide graveled space and a high, wire-mesh fence. Then the road joined the broad-ditched fiat which led off in either direction, almost level but gently curving, until the hills hid it each way.

Down the center of the flat, following its contours, stretched what looked for a long moment exactly like a miles-long, flattish, scaly serpent thirty yards wide. The individual scales, which ran in glitter-bordered rows eight or nine across, were mostly blue, brown, cream and black, though here and there was a green or red one. Judging by its glittering sides, the serpent had a silver belly.

Wojtowicz, coming up behind them, said, “Cripes, we’re there. That’s it. Wow!”

The scaly serpent was inland Route 101, jammed with cars bumper to bumper. The glitter-border was the freeway’s wire-mesh fence.

Doc said hoarsely, “I want to talk to Doddsy and McHeath.”

Rama Joan said, “Ann, you can get them.” The little girl climbed past her mother and hopped out.

As soon as Hunter’s and Margo’s eyes stopped swinging and started to linger, details began to destroy the serpent illusion. At many spots cars had been driven wide on the shoulder, up against the fence. Some of these had their hoods up and dabs of white at their sides — Hunter realized these last must be towels, shirts, scarves, and large handkerchiefs: pitifully obedient “askings for assistance” set up before the jam got impossible.

At several points the serpent scales were twisted and whorled: accidents never cleaned up and attempts of whole groups of cars to turn and go back the way they’d come, either by crossing the median strip or by using the shoulder.

At three places the wire-mesh fence bulged acutely outward, each bulge filled with cars nose-on: these must have been trying to ram their way out. One of these attempts had been limitedly successful: the fence was down, but the way out beyond it blocked by a mess of cars ditch-overturned and crushed together, two half-climbed onto the others’ backs.

Here and there a few cars still moved in senseless-seeming, backward and forward jerks of a few feet each way. Stale exhaust-stench mixed with the burnt reek coming on the moist southeast wind.

Hunter thought of what it must have looked like at night in the last stages of general movement: five thousand cars in sight from here, ten thousand headlights swinging and blinking, ten thousand bumpers to clash and snag and rip, a few police speeding up and down trying to keep open lanes that relentlessly shortened and narrowed, five thousand motors, belching exhaust pipes, horns…And about a hundred thousand more cars between here and L.A.

He heard the Ramrod saying, “It is the valley of dry bones. Lord of the Saucers, succor them.” From the car beside him Rama Joan said softly: “Even an evildoer sees happiness so long as his evil deed does not ripen; but when his evil deed ripens…”

The biggest and worst car-crush of all was where Monica Mountainway entered 101 just beyond the three white buildings: a hundred or so cars slewed every which way, several overset, others ditch-jammed sideways, and the nearest three dozen burnt black — it occurred to Hunter that he was very possibly looking at the source of the brush fire.

Only after he and Margo had studied the cars for quite a while (or for an interminable, incredulous, eye-darting moment) did they begin to see the people. It was as if some universal law forced vision to descend by size-stages.

People! — three or four to each car, at least. Many of them still sitting in them, by God. Others standing or walking between them, a few standing or sitting on fabric-or-cushion-spread car roofs. Off to the left, beyond the burnt swathe, many people had climbed the fence and set up blanket-and-beach-towel-shaded bivouacs, yet few if any of them seemed to have gone far from the freeway that penned their vehicles; perhaps they figured the jam would be cleaned up somehow in a few hours or a day. And there wasn’t much walking around — they were sticking to the shade.

It was a stale old joke, Hunter recalled, that Angelenos, using cars even to visit the people across the street, had forgotten how to walk — one of those jokes that are little more than the unretouched truth.

Just to the left of the Monica Mountainway outlet and car-crush, a clutch of black and white police cars was drawn up on a cleared stretch of shoulder, in a semicircle reminiscent of a wagon-train camp. This “laager” guarded a car-wide break in the fence, looking as if it had been done with heavy wire-clippers. A half-dozen police were inside it, and right now one of them took off on a motorcycle through the break, immediately turning and gunning along north on the flat outside the fence. A few people came out of their bivouacs and seemed to hail him, but he kept on, and they stood there as his dust-wake broadened and billowed around them.

To the right, where the big black cloudbank was growing rapidly higher, there were fewer bivouacs but more people in the open — slim people moving around fast, mostly, waving and leaping, gathering in clumps, dispersing, regath-ering. And it seemed to be from this direction that there, was coming, quite tinny and faint, the squawk and squeal and drumbeat of jazz.

Between the two groups of people behaving so differently, there was a hundred-yard stretch, including the Mountainway outlet, that had no people at all in it, even sitting in the cars — except for ten or so stretched here and there on the ground. Hunter wondered for a moment why they chose to rest in the baking sun, before it occurred to him they were dead.

He was fringe-aware of his comrades from the school bus and the truck gathered around the Corvette, too. Now he beard more footsteps coming and the Little Man saying, “Look at that cloudbank. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of a wet southeast wind like this in Southern Cal,” and McHeath replying, “Maybe the ocean’s broke through and filled the Salton Sea and other low spots, Mr. Dodd. And with — gee! — maybe a hundred miles of tidewater, there’d be lots of evaporation.” Hunter continued to scan the overpowering scene ahead.

Three of the slim, active ones came into the no-man’s land along the shoulder, moving in a cavorting, dancing run. One of them, by his gestures, might be carrying and swigging from a bottle. They’d come sixty yards when there was a crackle of gunfire from the police-car camp. One of the three fell — hard to tell at this distance whether he lay quiet or writhed. The other two vaulted over the nearest line of stalled cars and hid.

Hunter put his arm around Margo tight. “My God, Doc, what goes on?” he demanded.

“Yeah, for crissakes, Doc, tell us what you can see through the glasses,” Wojtowicz put in. “It looks like war.”

“It is,” Doc reported crisply. “Now listen to what I say, everybody that wants to,” he went on loudly, continuing to scan through the glasses, “because I’m not going to tell it twice and there’ll be no time for anybody else to sight-see with these. It’s a war, or a big skirmish, anyhow, between a lot of young people and the older people — or I should say the police helped by a few older people, but most of the rest of those neutral or at any rate useless. Big kids versus police protecting families. It’s the Day of the Children.

“Those slim ones are teenagers, mostly. They’re drinking — I can see a liquor truck bust open and kids handing out bottles. They got a live jazz band going in a cleared space. There are fights — knife and fist. A gang with sledges is smashing car windows and beating in car bodies for no sane reason.”

Doc censored from his account the acts of stark love-making he noted inside the cars — for shade rather than privacy, it seemed — the two girls dancing naked near the jazz band, the wanton beatings-up and terrorizings, and — in the other direction — the group draining a car radiator and eagerly drinking the…well, he hoped there weren’t too many additives in the water.

“But not all their violence is against cars or each other,” be went on. “There’s a bunch of them sneaking up right now between the empty cars towards the police camp. A few of them have guns, the rest bottles.

“I think the police have set up a little ambush on their side. At any rate I can see two or three of them crouched behind cars in the middle of the jam.

“But before the battle starts, we’re going to be out of here, heading back for Mulholland,” he went on in a louder voice, handing the glasses to Rama Joan and turning to face his crowd. “Doddsy! McHeath! Have Pop and Hixon turn their cars — there’s room to do it — and…”

“You mean you’re asking us to turn tail and run?” Hixon himself demanded loudly from where he was standing, rifle in hand, just beyond the Ramrod. “When there’s decent folks down there about to be swamped? When we could turn the tables easy with that gravity gun? Look, I been a cop myself. We got to help them.”

“No!” Doc rasped back at him. “We’ve got to protect ourselves and get the momentum pistol to some responsible science group — and while it’s still got power in it. How much charge is there left in the thing, Margo?”

“About one-third,” she told him, checking the violet line.

“See?” Doc continued to Hixon, “the thing has only four or five big shots left in it, at most. There are miles of those maniacs down there on 101. If we mix in, we’ll only turn a little battle into a big one. What’s down there is dreadful, I’ll admit, but it’s something that’s going on all over the world right now and we can’t afford to lose ourselves in it — one bucket of water tossed on a burning city! No, we backtrack! Go back and turn your truck around, Hixon—”

“Wait a minute, Doc!” This time it was Margo who interrupted, in a ringing voice. She moved in front of the Corvette.

“That’s Vandenberg Three down there,” she said, pointing with the momentum pistol at the three white buildings. “Morton Opperly may still be there. We’ve got to check.”

“Not one chance in fifty!” Doc barked at her. “Not in five hundred. He’ll have been ’coptered out — maybe by the one we saw this morning. No!”

“I’ve seen people moving inside,” Margo lied. “You agreed the idea is to get him this pistol. We’ve got to check.”

Doc shook his head “No! Too crazy a chance to take for next to nothing.”

Margo grinned at him. “But I’ve got the pistol,” she said, holding it against her chest, “and I’m going to take it down there if I have to walk.”

“That’s telling him!” Hixon cheered excitedly.

“All right, Miss Strongheart, then listen to me,” Doc said, bending forward toward her. “You go down there with that pistol, walking or in a car, and some crazy sniper picks you off, or you get jumped from three sides at once, and Opperly doesn’t get the weapon — those maniacs do. It’s got to stay here.

“But I’ll make you a proposition, Miss Gelhorn. You go down there without the weapon — I’ll give you my revolver — and bring Opperly back, or just find he’s there, and we’ll make the deal with him. How about it?”

Margo looked at Hunter. “You drive me?” He nodded and jumped for the sedan. She came around the side of the Corvette and held the momentum pistol toward Doc. “Trade.” He gave her his revolver and took it. Hunter started the sedan and drove it alongside the red car.

Hixon came forward. “Hey, I’m going too.”

“You want him?” Doc asked. Margo nodded. He asked Hixon: “You promise just to help them find Opperly?”

Hixon nodded, muttering, “Whoever he is.”

Doc said: “Okay then, but you’re the last one we can spare. No more volunteers!” He barked the last almost into the face of McHeath, coming up eagerly. “Gimme your rifle,” he told the boy. “You climb up those rocks back there—” he pointed to the easier gatepost — “and watch for us being outflanked…by anybody, including police!”

Hixon piled into the back of the sedan, Margo got in beside Hunter, Doc vaulted down and leaned an elbow on her window. “Hold on a second,” he said, scanning the jammed highway again just as action broke out there.

A dozen figures popped up from behind and between cars near the police camp. They threw things. Guns cracked and two or three of them fell. Things hit the police cars. Flames exploded.

“Molotov cocktails,” Hixon whispered, gnawing his lip.

Doc said: “Now’s a good time — they all got other things to think of.” He shoved his head in the window.

“I just got one thing to say to you,” he growled at the three of them. “Bring yourselves back, you bastards!”

Barbara Katz sat in the topmost spread of the big, pale, rung-like, right-angling branches of a gigantic dead magnolia tree, the westering sun hot on her back, and watched east under the blue sky for the Atlantic to come mounding back from Daytona Beach and Lake George over the neck of Florida. From time to time she tried to study the figures on the darkly-creased, sweat-stained tidal chart on the back of the calendar page Benjy had torn off for her yesterday morning, although she knew it could hardly apply closely any more, if at all. But there had been a high tide last night at three a.m. and so there should be another around the middle of this afternoon.

In the next spread of the branches down old KKK was tied to his seat with blanket strips around the big trunk, which shielded him some from the sun. Hester sat beside him, supporting his slumping head and easing his position as best she could. Nearby Helen and Benjy had their spots. Benjy had the rope he’d used to draw up the old man and some other things.

In their soiled and torn pale gray uniforms the three Negroes looked like bedraggled and ungainly brown-crested silver birds as they perched there high in the huge, nearly leafless tree.

The tree rose from a slight mound half covered by the exposed section of its own thick gray roots, on which the mud-spattered Rolls now was parked.

South of the mound stretched a tiny graveyard, its wooden headboards sand-drifted and some pushed down and all sedge-draped by the scour of the last high tide. At the foot of the graveyard was a small wooden church that had once been painted white. It was shifted a dozen feet off its foundation bricks and strained and twisted at the corners, though not broken apart. The brown mark of the tide went up about eight feet on it, almost to the flaking but newer-painted black letters over the door, which read CHURCH OF JESUS SAVER .

Barbara squeezed her eyes shut several times rapidly. It looked to her as if several patches of the blue sky had come down onto the flat, brown-green land to the east, a little like the watery reflections one sees far ahead on a level concrete road on a burning hot day. The blue patches grew and merged. No longer conscious of blinking, Barbara watched with an intensity approaching that of trance. Second linked to second and minute to minute seamlessly, as if the hooves of time had halted, or as if something in her stood still so that she could no longer hear their pounding.

Nor — so attentive was she to the strange phenomenon of the sky overflooding the land — did she much hear the physical roar coming louder and louder from the east, or the awed, excited calling back and forth of the three great gray featherless fowl beneath her, or even much feel the tree shake and strain as the waters came surging around it, or hear Helen’s scream.

But it did seem to her that the whole earth was tipping and sliding up into the sky as that blue came reaching dizzyingly underneath, and she leaned farther and farther backwards and would have fallen, except that now a body came pressing up against her side and a strong arm came around her back, bracing her.

“You hold on, Miss Barbara,” Benjy was shouting in her ear. “You watch so hard you fall.”

She looked around the watery plain. Florida was gone. The Church of Jesus Saver was floating off upside down with its eight short legs crookedly in the air.

She looked down again. The magnolia, its height halved, was a lonely midsea refuge. She thought of the Rolls Royce and giggled.

“I don’t know about that, Miss Barbara,” Benjy said, diviningly. “I hoist out the battery and ’stributor and some more parts. Grease others heavy — might help. Plug up gas tank tight at both ends, same for oil. Tide go down, she might run again, though I be surprise.”

The tree swayed with the surge and then swayed back. Helen squawked. Hester clutched at her. Benjy laughed crowingly. He said to Barbara: “But I still got hopes — some.”