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

“Take it easy, kid; we want to help
you.”
 

“You have guns!
 
You kill people!”
 
She couldn’t have been more than four.
 
Her voice still had a trace of a childish
lisp.
 
We finally quieted her hysteria by
giving her food.
 
She was ravenously
hungry; she ate like a starving animal.
 

While I still held her in my arms,
Psorkarian and I crossed the clearing and examined the bodies.
 
The adults had been shot.
 
The appearance of the camp suggested a
pitched battle.
 
I asked the girl what
had happened.
 

“They came and they talked to my Daddy
and then they began to shoot.”
 
With her
dirty hands she stuffed more crackers into her mouth.
 

“Who came, kid?”

“The bad men.
 
They said they would give Daddy money for our
food, and he wouldn’t take it.”
 

“Where are the men now, do you know?”

“In the woods.”
 
She pointed vaguely.
 
“Do you have anything else to eat?”

“All you can hold.
 
Let’s get you cleaned up first.”
 

“The picture’s clear enough,” the
Cossack said.
 
“Some of the survivors die
of radiation; the rest fight it out over the scraps of food that are
left.”
 

“In less than two months we’ve become
savages.”
 

“Starvation, Jerry, has one law—survival.”
 

A shot echoed from the trees and a
bullet sang across the fire ring.
 
The
child began to scream again.
 
The Cossack
fired his rifle into the darkness.
 
I
grabbed the girl and ran toward the helicopter.
 
Bullets slashed the earth close to my feet.
 
I threw the child into the back of the cabin
and snatched up the submachine gun, spraying the trees with lead.
 
I heard a shrill cry and a man’s voice
cursing.
 

Psorkarian pushed past me into the
ship.
 
I fired another round as he
started the motor.
 
I leaped into the
cabin and the helicopter rose slowly.
 
I
saw a mob of men and women crowding into the clearing, firing up at us.
 
I swept them with bullets from the machine
gun.
 

As our ship cleared the pines,
Psorkarian said, “They thought we had food—or maybe they wanted the
‘copter.”
 
I saw him smile.
 
“And I was just about to suggest that this
would be a peaceful place to spend the night.
 
Seems to me, we’ll be safer down in the valley with
the dead.”
 

Safer with the dead.
 
We didn’t have to worry about their integrity
or their respect.
 
Only the dead would
understand George Knight’s dream.
 
The living?
 
In
another generation they would be dancing war chants around a witch doctor’s
ceremonial campfire.
 

III
.
 
The
Valley—Christmas, The First Year

“You were right, Jerry,” Cheryl
said.
 
“It does sound pretty.”
 

I stooped and kissed the back of her
neck as I carried another log to the fire.
 
We were in our cabin dressing.
 
From the lodge next door we could hear the piano, and the voices singing
carols.
 
It was Christmas Eve, our first
winter in the valley.
 
Snow lay four feet
deep on the ground.
 
The full moon, riding
low above the ridge, transformed our tiny world into a fairyland.
 

The traditional Christmas was entirely
my idea.
 
My shadow government had been
against it.
 
Yorovich
and the Cossack because they knew nothing about the holiday; Cheryl because it
was a Christian festival excluding other faiths.
 

I knew if I turned the arrangements
over to Mom that I’d get exactly the thing I had in mind.
 
Mom was a storehouse for
superficialities.
 
She gave us an
innocuous holiday of genial good fellowship—a holiday for kids.
 

We had fourteen of them in the valley
that Christmas, ranging in age from four to fourteen.
 
After our first exploration north to Tahoe,
Psorkarian and I made six more helicopter hops out of the valley before the
snows began.
 
Each time we were able to
rescue orphaned children and bring them back with us.
 

The children gave me a kind of hope
again.
 
They would keep our new world
alive, if we failed.
 

The Cossack and I traveled as far away
from our valley as Utah and the northern states of Mexico.
 
We had seen so much desolation, so much
death,
we had become immune to it.
 
People had survived, yes—but fewer than we
would have guessed—and sometimes we spotted roving bands on the earth below
us.
 
They had become almost literally
savage tribes —barbarians, thinly veneered with the skills of civilization and
the mores of sophistication.
 

Twice the Cossack and I tried to talk
with small groups.
 
They respected us
because we were better armed; but they had no respect for what we had to
say.
 

One group gladly traded us two small
children for a case of canned food.
 
Even
the mothers shed no tears.
 
They had a
new system of values built on expediency, survival, and a reasonably full
belly.
 

Cheryl got up from the dresser, pushing
her new shirt—a bright, flannel plaid—into her jeans.
 
Mom had insisted on having gifts to go with
her kind of Christmas, and I authorized Lin Yeng to issue new clothes for all
of us from the warehouse.
 

“How do I look?” Cheryl asked.
 

“The way a wife should.”
 
I grinned and ran my hand over the swelling
mound of her abdomen.
 

She kissed me.
 
“Jerry, he’s going to be born in a good
world.”
 

“Of course, we’re making exactly—”

“I know how you’ve felt since that first
trip out, when you brought back little Nancy Watson.
 
You haven’t talked about it, but there isn’t
much you can hide from me.”
 

“It’s all right now, Cheryl.
 
I wanted to do too much too fast; I realize
that.”
 

“Do you, Jerry?
 
Sometimes I see the sadness and the
frustration in your eyes and I—
”
 
She
looked into my face.
 
“You need the symbolism of Christmas; we all
do.
 
Perhaps that’s why you insisted upon
it the way you did.”
 
She kissed me long
and ardently and her lips murmured, “Merry Christmas, Jerry.”
 

We crossed the snow to the lodge, using
the snowshoes Igor Morrenski had made us out of pine and strips of deer
hide.
 
Most of the others were there
ahead of us.
 
I had worked late that
afternoon in the corral, building a stall roof broken by the weight of
snow.
 
Three long tables were set close
together in front of the fire.
 
Mom had
decorated them with pinecones and fir boughs.
 
She had found some red and green candles in the warehouse.
 
The children sat together at one table,
laughing and whispering together and eyeing the packages under the tree.
 

As much as possible we kept the children
together, to build in their minds an instinctive pattern of mutual
sharing.
 
Yet a family discipline was
necessary, too; each of them had a permanent home in one of the lakeside
cottages.
 

The women brought in the food from the
lodge kitchen—three large roasts of deer meat, vegetables canned from our own
fields, cranberries withdrawn from the warehouse, hot pumpkin pies with a
strange, cracker-like crust made from ground cornmeal and our own butter.
 
Except for salt and sugar and luxury items,
we had made ourselves independent of the canned food in the village.
 

When our Christmas Eve dinner was
finished, Mom brought in the punchbowl.
 
I had let her have liquor to make the eggnog, which she considered
fundamental to the holiday.
 

Mom filled cups for all the adults.
 
She hesitated when she came to me.
 
At home she always made me a special,
“stickless” concoction—even after I had started in college, and had gone on
the usual freshman-year bender.
 
Finally
she filled a cup half full.
 
“You’re—you’re living with a woman now, Jerry; I guess it’s all
right.”
 

She never called it marriage.
 

I noticed that Vasili Shostovar and Karl
Grennig came back to the punchbowl three times in rapid succession.
 
I remember thinking that we might have trouble;
Mom’s eggnogs were never mild.
 
This was
the first time the two opportunists had a chance to drink since I put the
liquor in the storehouse.
 

But we were abruptly thrown into the
children’s world of Christmas, and I forgot about our two misfits.
 
Mom stooped under the tree and began to pass
out our presents.
 
Most of the others had
followed the pattern Cheryl and I set; nearly everything there was for a
child.
 

While the children played on the floor
under the tree, we went back to the punchbowl.
 
“Why, it’s empty!” Mom said, giggling a little—one of her eggnogs was certainly
more than she could handle.
 
I saw that
Grennig and Shostovar were gone.
 
They
had finished the eggnog and gone to sleep it off—or so I thought.
 

“I’ll have to make another batch,” Mom
decided, glancing at me.
 
“Jerry, won’t
you let us—”

“If it’s all right, Jerry,” Lin Yeng put
in, “I’ll run over to the warehouse and get some more liquor.”
 

I signed the withdrawal requisition and
handed it to him.
 
While he was gone, we
sang carols around the piano.
 
Half a dozen of them.
 
Then Barbara Yeng began to look anxious.
 

“I don’t know why he’s taking so long,”
she said.
 
“I’d better see if he needs
any help.”
 

She was back in five minutes, and Lin
Yeng was leaning heavily on her arm.
 
His
face was bruised and bleeding; his right eye was swollen shut.
 
Barbara helped him into a chair by the
fire.
 
While Hank Jenkins cleaned the
wounds, the Chinese told us what had happened.
 

When he opened the door of the
storehouse, Grennig and Shostovar had been inside—very drunk.
 
They were maneuvering a case of whiskey
through a broken window.
 
Yeng went to
stop them—and that was all he remembered until Barbara found him sprawled on
the floor.
 

My immediate reaction was to go after
the two men, but I reminded myself that this was a community
responsibility—and I waited to see what the others would do.
 
This was our first clear-cut criminal
act.
 

And I wasn’t let down.
 
They reached a decision almost as a matter
of course, each of them in
his own
way very much aware
of the precedent of justice we were setting up.
 

Igor Morrenski said slowly, “They have
taken material from our warehouse without a requisition—without even offering
to do the extra work to earn it.
 
We
should make them do the work, and deprive them of what’s left of the stolen
liquor as a penalty.”
 

“If they refuse—”

“Then they should have none of the other
things they get by living with us.
 
That
means food and a place to sleep and our friendship.”
 

“That’s exile!” Mom cried.