“No shit?” Christopher exclaimed. “State cops with the cannibals?”
“Well, he wore the uniform,” Deke said. “And some guy who’d been an official in Los Angeles, a black man. And others. Most of them were okay, but two were… hell, they were weird!” He looked to Baker and got a nod of agreement.
“Really weird,” Deke continued. “Acted like they were on dope. The eyes looked like that, wide, you know, and they wouldn’t look straight at you. And they talked about the angels of the Lord. ‘The angels have sent us to deliver this message.’ ”
“How did the others react to that?” Harvey Randall asked.
“Like nothing happened. Like it was normal to talk about the angels sending them. And when I asked what the hell that meant, they just turned and left. ‘You have the message.’ That’s all they’d say.”
“And you said there were two hundred camped near you?” Al Hardy asked. “How near? Where?”
“Not far. South, down the road,” Deke said. “Why?”
“Harry went out your way,” Hardy said. “He’s not overdue, he doesn’t keep any exact schedule, but we’ve been expecting him.”
“He never got to my place,” Deke said.
“Do you think this outfit has done anything to Harry?” Jellison asked.
Deke shrugged. “Senator, I don’t know what to make of those people. They claim to have a lot more troops than the ones they let us see, and I believe it. We don’t see traders anymore. No refugees. It’s like there’s nobody out there except you and the New Brotherhood.”
“Angels,” Al Hardy said. “It doesn’t make much sense.”
Not neat, Harvey Randall thought. Not neat at all, and it disturbs Al. “I met Montross a few times,” Harvey said. “He didn’t seem crazy to me. He was hyped up on the subject of environmentalism. Spray cans destroying the ozone, that kind of thing. Maybe the Hammer drove him over the edge.”
“He may be crazy, he may be a prisoner, anything could be,” Deke Wilson said. “But there’s two hundred men camped down the road, I’d bet they’ve got five hundred more, and I don’t know what the hell to do.”
“No. I don’t suppose you do,” the Senator said. He paused for thought, and no one interrupted him. Presently he said, “Well. Six more days. Deke, I was going to make you an offer. You could bring your women and children and injured here, and your part would be to salvage things for us. Tools, electronics, that sort of thing, starting with scuba gear you could use to dive for—”
“Where does that leave us time to fight the New Brotherhood Army, Senator?”
Jellison sighed. “It doesn’t, of course. And I don’t suppose that Governor Montross — or whoever is controlling him — will be interested in sharing your salvage with us. It sounds as if he intends to take control of the whole state.”
“Including our valley,” George Christopher said.
“Yes, I expect so,” Jellison said. “Well. Two governments we’ve discovered today. Colorado Springs, and the New Brotherhood Army. Plus the possibility of angels.”
“So what the hell do I do?” Deke demanded.
“Be patient. We don’t know enough,” Jellison said. “Let’s get some more data. General Baker, what can you tell us about the rest of the United States? The rest of the world for that matter?”
Johnny Baker nodded and leaned back to organize his thoughts. “We never did have much for communications,” he said. “We lost Houston right after Hammerfall. Colonel Delanty’s family was killed in that, by the way. I’d go easy on asking him about Texas.”
Baker was pleased to see that the others still had enough sensitivity to show sympathy for Rick. From what he had seen out there, most of the world couldn’t find tears to shed for a few individuals. There was too much death. “My Russian friends also lost their families,” Johnny said. “The war started less than an hour after the Hammer struck. China hit Russia. Russia hit China. A few of our missile bases launched at China, too.”
“Jesus,” Al Hardy said. “Harvey, have you got anything that would measure radiation?”
“No.”
They all looked alarmed. Harvey nodded agreement. “We’re right in the fallout pattern,” he said. “But I don’t know what we should do about it.”
“Is there anything we can do about it?” Hardy asked.
“I think it’s safe,” Johnny Baker said. “Rain settles fallout. And there’s plenty of rain. The whole world looks like a big ball of cotton. We hardly ever saw the ground after the Hammer fell.”
“You mentioned communications,” Jellison prompted.
“Yes. Sorry. Well, we talked to Colorado Springs, but it was very short, not much more than exchanging IDs. We got a SAC base, once. In Montana. They hadn’t any communications with anyone. And that’s all in the U.S.” He paused to let that sink in.
“As for the rest of the world, South Africa and Australia are probably in good shape. We don’t know about Latin America. None of us knew enough Spanish, and when we did get contact with somebody down there, it didn’t last long. We got some commercial radio broadcasts, though, and as near as we can make out they’re having a revolution a week in Venezuela, and the rest of the continent’s got political problems too.”
Jellison nodded. “Hardly surprising. And of course their most important cities were on the coasts. I don’t suppose you know how high the tsunamis got in the Southern Hemisphere?”
“No, sir, but I’d guess they were big,” Johnny Baker said. “The one that hit North Africa was over five hundred meters high. We saw that, just before the clouds covered everything. Five hundred meters of water sweeping across Morocco…” He shuddered. “Europe’s gone. Completely. Oh, and all the volcanoes in Central and South America let go. The smoke came right up through the clouds. The whole Ring of Fire has let go. You’ve got volcanoes east of you, somewhere out in Nevada, I think, and up north of here Mount Lassen and Mount Hood and maybe Rainier, a lot of them in northern California and Oregon and Washington.”
He went on, and as he spoke they realized just how alone they were. The Imperial Valley of California: gone, with a Hammerstrike in the Sea of Cortez that sent, had to have sent, waves washing clear up to the Joshua Tree National Monument in the mountains west of Los Angeles. Scratch Palm Springs and Palm Desert and Indio and Twentynine Palms, forget about the valley of the Colorado River.
“And something must have hit in Lake Huron,’-’ Baker said. “We saw the usual spiral pattern of cloud with a hole in the center, just before everything turned white.”
“Is there anything left of this country outside Colorado?” Al Hardy asked.
“Don’t know again,” Baker said. “With all that rain, I’d think the Midwest is drowned out — no crops, no transportation, lots of people starving—”
“And killing each other for what’s left,” Al Hardy said. He looked at each of the others in turn, and they all nodded agreement: The Stronghold was lucky. More than luck, because they had the Senator, and they had order, a tiny island of safety in a world that had very nearly been killed.
Why us? Harvey Randall wondered. Johnny Baker’s report hadn’t surprised him, not really. He had thought it out long before. There was the matter of no radio communications. True, the constant static made it unlikely they’d receive messages, but there ought to be something, once in awhile, and there almost never was, which had to mean that nobody was broadcasting, not with any real power, not constantly.
But it was different to know they were one of the few pockets of survivors.
What had happened to the world? A revolution a week in Latin America. Maybe that was the answer everywhere. What the Hammer and the Sino-Soviet war hadn’t done, people were busily doing to themselves.