“Will he let me in?”
“Are you crazy? You’re a lot more valuable than I am. Remember the observatory?”
“Sure. After all, I’m such a damn good accountant.”
“If they’re as organized around Springville as they were in Tujunga, they’ll need an accountant to take care of distributing goods. They may even have a barter system. That could get complicated, with money obsolete.”
“Now you’re the crazy one,” Eileen said. “Anyone who does his own income tax can keep accounts. That’s everyone but you, Tim. The accountants and the lawyers run this country, and they want everyone to be like them, and they’ve damn near succeeded.”
“Not anymore.”
“That’s my point. Accountants are a drug on the market now.”
“I don’t go in without you,” said Tim.
“Sure, I know that. The question is whether we go in or not. Are you hungry?”
“But of course I’m hungry, my child.” Tim reached into the back seat. “Fritz gave us tomato bisque and chicken with rice. Both concentrated. I could put them in front of the heater. Can you drive with one hand?”
“I guess not, not on this.”
“Oh, never mind. We don’t have a can opener.”
Our thanks God for small miracles; they’re easier to grasp.
One small miracle was a road humping out of the sea to cross the tracks. Suddenly the tracks were sunk in blacktop and Eileen stamped on the brake pedal almost hard enough to send Tim through the windshield.
They flopped their seats back, rolled into each other’s arms and slept.
Eileen’s sleep wasn’t calm. She jerked, she kicked, she cried out. Tim found that if he ran the palm of his hand down her spine, she would relax and fall back to sleep, and then he could sleep too, until next time.
He woke in black night to the scream of wind and the panicky pressure of Eileen’s fingernails and the perilous rocking of the car. Eileen’s eyes were wide, her mouth too firmly set. “Hurricanes,” he said. “The big ocean strikes’ll keep spinning them off. Be glad we found a safe place first.” She didn’t react. “We’re safe here,” he repeated. “We can sleep through it.”
She laughed then. “I dare you. What happens if one of these hits us while we’re on the tracks?”
“Then you’d better be as good as you think you are.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, and — incredibly — went back to sleep.
Tim lay beside her in the howling and the rocking. Did hurricanes overturn cars? You bet they did. When he tired of thinking about that, he thought about how hungry he was. Maybe he could use the bumper to pry open a soup can. After the hurricane passed.
He dozed… and woke in total silence. There wasn’t even rain. He located a soup can and stepped outside. He managed to bend the bumper a little, but he also tore the soup can open. He swallowed some of the condensed tomato bisque, and that was how he happened to look up.
He looked up into a wide patch of clear stars.
“Beautiful,” he said. But he entered the car in some haste.
Eileen was sitting up. He gave her the soup can. “I think we’re in the eye of the hurricane. If you want to see the stars, look quick and come back.”
“No, thanks.”
The soup was cold and gluey. It left them both thirsty. Eileen set the can on the roof to collect rainwater, and they lay down again to wait for morning.
The rain came again, in frantic violence. Tim reached through the window for the can, and found it gone. He found the abandoned beer can on the floor, pried it open, filled it twice in the rainwater streaming from the car roof.
Hours later, the rain settled down to a gentle drumming. By then it was full daylight: just enough dirty gray light to see that the sea around them was thick with floating things. There were corpses of dogs and rabbits and cattle, far outnumbered by the bodies of human beings. There was wood in all its forms, trees and furniture and the walls of houses. Tim got out and fielded some driftwood and set it in front of the car heater. “If we ever find shelter, we’ve still got that other can of soup,” he said.
“Good,” said Eileen. She sat bolt upright at the steering wheel, and the motor was going. Tim didn’t urge her. He knew better than to volunteer for the job, and he knew what it would cost her.
She shifted into gear.
“Hold it,” Tim said, and he put a hand on her shoulder and pointed. She nodded and put the car back in neutral.
A wave came toward them in a long thread of silver-gray. It wasn’t high. When it reached the car it was no more than two feet tall. But the sea had risen in the night until it stood around the tires. The wave slapped against the car and lifted them and carried them and set them down almost immediately with the motor still going.
Eileen sounded exhausted. “What was that, another earthquake?”
“I’d say a dam collapsed somewhere.”
“I see. Only that.” She tried to laugh. “The dam has broken! Run for your lives!”
“The Cherokees is escaped from Fort Mudge!”
“What?”
“Pogo. Skip it,” Tim said. “All that water out there… this won’t be the first dam that went. All of them, probably. Maybe here and there the engineers got spillways open in time. Maybe. But most of the dams are gone.” Which, he thought, means most of the electric power everywhere. Not even local pockets of electricity. He wondered if the power houses and generators had survived. Dams could be built again.
Eileen put the Blazer into gear and started forward, slowly.
The Southern Pacific tracks took them most of the way to Porterville. The tracks and embankment rose gradually until what surrounded them was no longer sea, but land that looked as if it had recently risen from the depths: Atlantis returned. Still Eileen kept to the tracks, though her shoulders were shivering with the strain.
“No people on the tracks, and no stalled cars,” she said. “We’re avoiding those, aren’t we?” They hadn’t, completely; sometimes forlorn groups of refugees, usually in families, trudged along the right-of-way.
“I hate to leave them,” Eileen said. “But — which ones should we take? The first ones we see? Be selective? No matter what we do, we’d have the car filled and people on top and there’d still be more—”
“It’s all right,” Tim said. “We don’t have anyplace to go either.” But he sat brooding, feeling her mood. What right did they have to expect anyone to help them? They weren’t helping anyone themselves…
South and east of Porterville they rolled down a wet embankment to resume their trek on 190. Tim took over the driving, and Eileen lay in the reclined passenger seat, exhausted but unable to sleep.
The land looked recently drowned. Studying the broken buildings and fences and uprooted trees, Tim became certain that a flood had come from the direction they were traveling. There was mud everywhere, and Tim had many occasions to feel proud of his judgment. He didn’t think any other car in the world could have got them over some places they passed.
“Lake Success,” Eileen said. “There was a big lake up there, and the dam must have gone. The road goes right past it…”
“Yeah?”
“I’m wondering if there’s any road there,” she said. They went on, until they reached the junction that should have taken them up into the hills.
The land was mud everywhere, studded with cars in every possible attitude. There were bodies, but no living human beings. They were glad for the rain. It kept them from seeing very far into the muddy ditch to their left. The road became worse, washed out in places, covered with mud in others.
Eileen took over driving again, guessing where the road had been and hoping it was still there under the mud. The Blazer kept moving, but more slowly…
Then they saw the campfire. A half-dozen cars, some as good as the Blazer. Here were people of all sexes and ages, a gathering of the hopeless. Somehow they’d started a fire, and there was a pile of wood under a plastic shelter. The people stayed in the rain; wood was kept near the fire to dry.