Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) (24 page)

“How many Communist troops are in Los
Angeles now, Grennig?”

“Two hundred thousand.
 
A quarter of a million at
most.
 
The whole Red machine has
broken down in Europe and Asia.
 
The
after-effects of the bombing are worse than anyone expected.
 
The Politburo is finished…”

LOS Angeles was the only metropolitan
area, which had a chance of surviving.
 
That was the assumption we had to make.
 
More and more I realized how fundamental Knight’s message was.
 
The invading army was all that remained of
the enemy, and the city was all of America that had escaped the disaster.
 
Here, flung together, were the two halves of
our world, the last fragments of the old civilization.
 
Here they had to find peace; they had to
survive.
 
In this city—if they listened
to Knight—we could build tomorrow.
 

If they listened to
George Knight.
 
They had to hear the Quaker’s message and
they had to believe in it.
 
It was the
only chance.
 

XII
.
 
The
City—Tuesday,
The Fifth day.
 
Jerry Bonhill

TUESDAY afternoon, the fifth day of the
war, I went back to Los Angeles with Stewart Roswell.
 
Grennig piloted our helicopter.
 

I wore two revolvers belted to my jeans
and I carried a rifle.
 
But I made sure
Grennig carried no arms.
 

I offered Roswell a rifle, but he pushed
it aside.
 
“I’ve never shot a gun in my
life, Jerry.”
 

“It’s time you started learning.”
 

He smiled.
 
“Even to build a society based on love?”

“Idealism with teeth in
it.”
 
I pushed the weapon in his hands; he took it
reluctantly.
 
“A man has to survive
before he can build.”
 

Grennig brought the ‘copter low over San
Bernardino and we saw the first stark evidence of the fighting.
 
The downtown district of the suburb was a
burned-out ruin.
 
Residential streets had
been bombed indiscriminately, but many of the houses were still standing.
 

As we moved closer to Los Angeles, the
devastation became worse.
 

The industrial district and the heart of
the city were an unrecognizable shambles.
 

Roswell said, “They were expecting a
naval attack when Knight and I left the city.”
 

“That must have been the heavy guns we
heard yesterday.”
 

Roswell’s face was white; beads of sweat
stood on his lips.
 
“It looks as if the
navy made a successful landing.
 
The
Russians were trapped.
 
They used gas
and destroyed everything—to hold the territory they had taken.”
 

Karl Grennig broke in, “Our boys are
supposed to have—I mean to say, the Communists are supposed to have very
effective chemical weapons.
 
A couple of
dozen bombs dropped from the air would wipe out the city.”
 

At Roswell’s request we flew north from
the harbor and landed on the beach.
 
The
homes along the ocean front boulevard were undamaged.
 
Roswell picked up the rifle I had given
him.
 

“Idealism with teeth to it,” he
muttered.
 
“I’m going to need this after
all, Jerry.”
 

He jumped from the cabin, landing on
the soft warm sand.
 
“One man would give
the order to destroy the city; and one man would manage to survive, if
all the
world died.
 
Don’t wait for me.
 
I don’t think
I’ll be back.”
 

He strode toward the wooden stairs
leading from the beach to the top of the bluff.
 
I called after him, “Where the hell’re you going, Roswell?”

He plodded on without answering.
 
I motioned Grennig toward the cabin
door.
 
His face paled.
 
“It’s suicide, Bonhill!
 
There are still some Soviet troops around up
there.
 
We don’t stand a chance.”
 

“Then we have to bring Roswell back,
don’t we?”

When Grennig and I reached the
boulevard, Roswell was on the walk in front of a large, pseudo-Spanish
mansion.
 
I knew the house.
 
It belonged to Marvin Dragen III.
 

Soviet soldiers lay dead on the
boulevard, their guns still clutched in their hands.
 
These were the diehards; they had won the
city of the dead—and died themselves.
 
None of the men was wearing a mask.
 
Obviously they hadn’t known the gas was to be used.
 

I saw him, then, as the door of the
Dragen house swung open.
 
A tall, Soviet General in full dress uniform.
 
The Order of Lenin on his breast caught and
held the glint of the afternoon sun.
 
He
was wearing a gas mask that hid his face and deprived him of his only human
resemblance.
 

A god of
war gone
mad, for the danger from the gas had long since gone.
 
He held a submachine gun in his hand.
 
He aimed it at Stewart Roswell.
 

“Zergoff,” Roswell whispered.
 

The Russian squeezed the trigger before
I had time to fire.
 
The hammer of
Zergoff’s weapon fell on an empty chamber.
 

“I held the beachhead,” the Russian
said proudly, his voice muffled by the mask.
 
“Not even the American navy could throw me out.”
 

“You did this?” Roswell asked.
 
“You killed them all?”

Roswell fumbled with his rifle.
 
But he did not fire.
 
He turned away and walked toward Grennig and
me, staggering like a drunken man.
 
Zergoff continued to fire.
 

“Let him die in his own way,” Roswell
said, “in his dead city.
 
Pray God give
him just one minute of sanity before it’s over!
 
Let him smell the stench of death and see the
ruins; let him know the thing he’s done
;
let him judge
his own inhumanity.
 
That’s hell enough
for any man.”
 

Roswell gripped my arm.
 
He was gasping for breath and I saw tears in
his eyes.
 

The First
Two Years, Jerry Bonhill

I.
 
The Valley—Tuesday evening, The Fifth Day

THIS was our physical world—fourteen men
and two boys
;
twelve women and a Mexican child of
fourteen.
 
Five of them were Chinese; two
were Negro; two Indians; four Russians, a German and an Italian.
 
Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Hindus, Buddhists.
 
The races of man; the
nations of man; the faiths of man.
 

I told them briefly what we had seen in
Los Angeles.
 
I said they were free to go
back to the dead city and live with the dead, scavenging food in the
ruins.
 

I saw dismay on their faces, the shadow
of the lonely horror.
 
I went on quickly
to suggest a general plan of survival.
 

I said we would begin with an inventory
of our resources—the tools, the canned food, the clothing, the gasoline, the
hunting guns, the shells, which were available in the village.
 
We would move everything into the largest
market and use it as a warehouse.
 
Until
we worked out a system of replacements, nothing was to be taken out of that
warehouse except on my written order.
 
I
asked Lin Yeng and his wife to manage the warehouse for us—to classify the supplies
and to set up an accounting system for all withdrawals.
 

From the back of the room Vasili
Shostovar spoke up.
 
“Highhanded is the
word for it.
 
Suppose we don’t want to
play your game, Bonhill?”

I answered quietly, “You don’t have to
stay in the valley.”
 

Shostovar snorted.
 
“
All this
fine talk
of yours about your American way of life!
 
Right now you’re setting up Communism.
 
Did we vote on any of this?
 
Did
we elect you to—
”

Psorkarian sprang up, his face angry in
the white glare of the lantern.
 
“Then
we’ll hold an election.
 
We’ll put Jerry
in office.”
 

I knew the Cossack would get a majority,
but that sort of formal procedure was the last thing I wanted.
 
“These are only emergency measures,” I told
him.
 
“Anyone of you would suggest
exactly the same things.”
 

I set up a communal dining system for
all of us in the lodge, because that made it easier to use our food
efficiently.
 
I asked seven women to do
the kitchen chores—Mom, the Sutong sisters, and three of the women Chen Phiang
had picked up on the road.
 
Since the
supply of fresh food was our most immediate problem, I suggested that we begin
farming operations at once.
 

Morrenski said, in his plodding way, “I
have seen seed packets in the stores here.
 
We can use them for the first planting.”
 

“For our second season, we’ll take seeds
from this year’s crop,” Trenev added.
 

I assigned Chen Phiang, Shostovar,
Grennig and Giorgio Leopardi to work with Morrenski and Trenev, and I threw in
the three kids as well—Jim Riley, Ted Fisher and Carlota Porra.
 
It would do them good to work in the summer
sun, and they needed to feel that they were doing their part.
 

Our only source of fresh meat would be
the game we shot.
 
I appointed Boris
Yorovich and Feodor Psorkarian our community hunters.
 
It was logical, then, to give them control of
our firearms.
 
In the shadow government I
had to make, the two men would be the police power.
 

We had one more interruption from
Shostovar.
 
“You’re organizing a nice
little dictatorship, Bonhill; I hope the rest of these fools understand
that.”
 

“An emergency economy,” I repeated
patiently.
 

“
Communism,
and
we may as well face it.
 
You arbitrarily assign
us work.
 
You give us no choice.
 
You—”

“You make the choice if you stay in the
valley,” I reminded him for a second time.
 
“We’ve all had our fill of arguments over words, Shostovar.
 
There’s one big difference between what we’re
doing and the police state you came from.
 
Here you aren’t afraid to say what you think.
 
You didn’t hesitate to call me a dictator a
minute ago.
 
You know you can talk as
much as you like and nothing’s going to happen to you.”
 

The meeting broke up after dark.
 

“This is the beginning, isn’t it?”
Cheryl asked me as we crossed the hill.
 

“We’ll survive.
 
If we have faith in ourselves, our world will
never die.”
 

Faith:
 
that fundamental human need.
 
I
had organized the material resources of the valley, but I had provided nothing
to satisfy man’s inner soul.
 
I mulled
that over as I showered and dressed for dinner.
 

It was the problem of formal religion,
and I was afraid of it—afraid of the potential conflict it involved.
 
Each man has his own god.
 
A sincere faith often comes hand in hand with
a fanatic will to convert others.
 
We had
such a jumble of orthodoxies in our valley, faith itself might one day smash
our new world into dust.
 

My solution to the problem crystalized
around the feeling each of us had for George Knight.
 
I proposed it that night at dinner in the
lodge.
 

The knoll where Knight and Thatcher and
the Negro were buried I made our community place of worship—
a
church without walls and without ritual, a church for all men open
to
the face of God.
 

The idea was a dud at first.
 
The conventions of the dead world passed
slowly.
 
Yet, in time, we accepted the
knoll as a commonplace part of our lives.
 

It was a slow-working miracle performed
by the gentle persuasion of a Quaker who was dead.
 
It made us see the essential spirit of all
our gods.
 

It was our first real vision of George
Knight’s new world.
 

II
.
 
Outside
the
Valley—July, The First Year

IN JULY I made my first expedition away
from the valley.
 
By that time our
economy was functioning without a hitch.
 
We were farming more than fifty acres of the rich, black soil; the corn
was already waist high.
 

Eight times Chen Phiang and Feodor
Psorkarian drove to the city, foraging for equipment and supplies we had not
found in the village.
 
By their third
trip they had brought back two enormous vans, and enough drums of diesel fuel
to keep the trucks running for years.
 

They pillaged every library that had
escaped the fire.
 
Stewart Roswell
classified the books and shelved them in the village high school.
 
Eventually we had more than two hundred
thousand volumes.
 
Reading became one of
our regular leisure activities.
 

That summer was an idyll for us
all.
 
We faced no hardship and no privation;
none of us had any really difficult work to do.
 
Four or five hours a day was the longest time anyone worked on the
farm.
 
An idyll in the
hot, mountain sun.
 

By the beginning of July ten couples had
moved into cottages along the lake.
 
Yorovich was living with Janice Gage and Psorkarian had taken Lola
Donne—or perhaps it was the other way around.
 

A kind of wedding ceremony gradually
developed.
 
At a meal in the lodge, when
we were all together, both the man and the woman formally announced their
intention to live with each other.
 
They
asked me to assign them a cabin of their own.
 

Chen Phiang married Charlotte
Sutong.
 
Charlotte’s sister, Betty, was
living with the
most
adaptable of the two Indians,
Palra Rubhai.
 

Giorgio Leopardi married Helen White, a
fragile, serious, intelligent girl very much like himself.
 
Conscientious in the ritual of his church,
Leopardi went through an intense, inner conflict before he made up his
mind.
 
We had no ordained priest to
perform the sacrament of marriage and no likelihood of finding any.
 

Igor Morrenski, plodding, slow-witted,
and conscientious, took a wife amazingly different from himself.
 
Emily Marsh, not yet twenty, was by far the
most attractive of the five refugees the Yengs had brought in.
 
She was a goddess for him to worship.
 

Only Karl Grennig and Vasili Shostovar
had not taken wives.
 
Except for Mom and
Virginia Grant, both in their sixties, and Carlota Porra, not yet fourteen, we
had no other unattached women in the valley.
 
Potentially it could become an explosive situation.
 
The least reliable men in our community were
excluded from something the rest of us shared.
 

In order to head off that conflict, I
tried to find other refugees to bring to the valley.
 
During July Grennig taught me to fly the helicopter;
he gave the same instruction to Psorkarian, because I was taking the Cossack
with me.
 
I needed his quick wit and very
possibly his accurate trigger finger.
 
Our shadow government I left to Stewart Roswell and Boris Yorovich.
 

We flew north first, beyond the
Techachapis.
 
The San Joaquin Valley was
a wasteland.
 
Three or more of the big
bombs had fallen there—perhaps because Soviet bombers had been shot down over
the valley, or the San Joaquin may have been a tactical Soviet target.
 
In either case, the results were the
same.
 

Farther north the devastation was
worse.
 
The bombs in the San Francisco
area had changed the face of the map.
 
A
forty-mile chunk of the peninsula had disappeared; the bay was open to the
sea.
 
A tiny, smooth-domed island, washed
by a heavy sea, marked the point where the city had been.
 
Bombs had ripped open an inland lake farther
west in the bed of the Sacramento River.
 

Two hundred miles north of the state
capital we saw our first people, an enormous refugee camp sprawling on the
flat, hot plain near Shasta Dam.
 
Shock
waves had cracked open the dam and water trickled in scores of tiny streams
across the plain.
 
Tents, shacks
jerrybuilt from cardboard containers, and automobiles crowded the banks of the
streams.
 
We skimmed low over the camp,
and we smelled the stench of death.
 
The
bodies, huddled by the water, were bloated and black with decay.
 
Buzzards picked at the white skulls; coyotes
walked the ruins.
 

We followed the Sierra range south.
 
On the Feather River we spotted a small camp,
but it was deserted.
 
Two dozen
automobiles were parked by stone fire rings.
 
Clothing, cots, and empty food cartons were scattered on the ground,
perhaps by foraging bears.
 
Water from a
recent rain lay in the open fire beds, indicating that the people had been
gone for some days.
 

At dusk we were over Tahoe.
 
The forests and the resorts on the east shore
of the lake had burned in a fire started by the bomb that flattened Reno.
 
The fire had cut a crescent path around
Emerald Bay.
 
We saw three cars in the
State
Park which
overlook the bay.
 
Ten people were sprawled grotesquely on the
ground.
 
A child was crawling in the
dust.
 

We brought the helicopter down in the
clearing.
 
The child screamed when she saw
us and tried to run.
 
I caught her.
 
She clawed at my face with her hands and
pounded her fists against my chest.