The creek was high, running fast and brown. Allison worried about it. The willows and oaks along the stream seemed to be handling the UV pretty well so far, but most of the local grasses were dying off. Erosion was getting serious, and in places the creek had undercut healthy trees and toppled them into the water.
The valley narrowed as he drove southwest, until the road wound through a steep-sided canyon just a few feet above the creek. As he came round a corner, Allison swore and stamped on the brake. Walking in the middle of the road was a tall figure in a hooded green poncho.
Without even glancing over his shoulder, the man moved to the side of the road. Allison roared past him in a spray of mud and gravel, then stopped and backed up.
“Need a ride?”
The man was young, with a blistered red face beneath sunglasses. He smiled shyly and nodded.
“Where you headed?” Allison asked.
“Monterey, sir.”
“Jesus, that’s still eight or nine more miles. Come on, get in. I’m going right into Monterey.”
“Bless you, sir. It’s very generous of you.”
One of the Brotherhood. Allison cursed the guilty charity that had made him stop, while the young man got in and dripped on the leather seat.
The canyon twisted around a long, steep spur of rock and ended abruptly; the road dropped through a stand of oaks and met the Carmel Valley highway. From the valley, it was hard to see any clear break at all in the hills; Escondido was indeed a hidden creek.
Allison drove fast, with his usual brusque aggressiveness. Not many other cars were on the road; the fields and orchards of the Carmel Valley looked bleak; the only livestock in sight were six or seven cows in a meadow, bunched around a stack of hay. Each wore clear plastic goggles — too common a sight to be funny anymore. Cattle without them went blind in a day, and the pain in their eyes drove them crazy. A blinded bull had killed a rancher up the valley a couple of months ago.
“How are your livestock doing?” Allison asked, though he knew they must be alive — his passenger smelled strongly of cowshit.
“They’re mostly well, praise God.”
“Hell of a time to be ranching, though.”
“It’s the time of Tribulation, sir. We bear what the Lord sends us. Are you saved, sir?”
“Afraid not.”
“I’ll pray for you. And I’ll ask Mr. Lamb to pray for you too. Once you’re saved, these troubles don’t burden you.”
“Who’s Mr. Lamb?”
“He’s our leader. A very holy man. He’s drawn us together here to care for one another and endure the Tribulation.”
Allison was tempted to wonder whether a truly holy man would hole up on Escondido Creek when the world outside was falling apart; but he had wasted too much of his youth arguing with cranks and cultists in the film business to bother arguing. He said nothing, and the young man fell silent also. The Mercedes hissed through the rain.
Carmel, with its kitschy dollhouse roofs among the pines, had all the charm of an out-of-season amusement park. A hand-lettered sign had been stuck into the gravel shoulder of the road: NO WORK KEEP GOING. The hospitality of Old California, Allison reflected, didn’t extend to unemployed drifters.
North of the town, Highway 1 was really deserted, and he drove fast until he reached Monterey. With the tourist trade dead, the city was sustaining its revenues by nailing speeders; Allison kept carefully within the limit.
“Where can I drop you?” he asked.
“Anywhere along here will be fine, sir.” Allison pulled over to the curb. Three men, loafing in the entrance to a bar, stared opaquely at the car. Out-of-town drifters could be chased away, but not the local boys.
The young man put out a big, calloused hand. “Thank you, sir. May God bless and keep you.”
“And you,” Allison replied solemnly. The kid was a zombie, all right, but a likeable one. Put a machete in his hand and he’d make a great psychopathic killer, stalking the unbelievers. Too bad you couldn’t make a nickel from a religious-nut movie any more, not with half the audience just as cracked as this kid but not so polite.
Allison accelerated again as he passed the shabby storefronts of Seaside. The few businesses still open had heavy wire screens over their windows, and signs on their doors: Guard Dog on Duty, Max. Two Customers in Store at a Time, Clerk Is Armed. Tough times. The only laugh anyone had had in ages had been President Wood’s inaugural boast that the recession would be over in sixty days. That had been three weeks ago; nothing had changed yet, except that people had stopped saying “recession” and started saying “depression,” just like the Reagan years.
Highway 1 curved northeast around Monterey Bay. The view was spectacular, even in the rain: to the west the long dark arm of the peninsula, to the north the open grey waters of the bay, to the northeast the long dunes that marched along the coast. Out in the bay he saw a tanker coming in to its offshore moorage, three or four miles due west of the refinery at Moss Landing. A monster, one of the half-million-tonners that had come out of moth balls recently. With almost no oil coming out of the Middle East anymore, the North Slope of Alaska had become crucially important; tankers were running up and down the coast nonstop, but even so the supply was never enough. To overcome the bottleneck, they were even refining some of the oil in Valdez and sending it down as gasoline and diesel fuel. Allison toyed with the idea of a tanker-hijack story; half a million tons of gasoline would be worth a hell of a lot these days, when it cost six dollars a gallon with a ration card, and fifteen on the black market. Well, save it for later —
He was at Fort Ord. To his right were the boxy little prefabs of married-personnel housing; to his left, the firing ranges, closed off from the sea by steep dunes. Despite the rain, many of the ranges were in use. Most of the trainees were blacks; the whites stood out because of the anti-sunburn ointment on their faces. They all looked wet and miserable. The irregular popping of rifle fire made him think again about buying some guns; it was getting easy to imagine Shauna being pulled from her car and raped, himself being beaten up by some mob. Paranoia — the stock response of the middle class in hard times.
The three black guards at the main gate looked a little paranoid too: brisk, alert, suspicious. Even in the rain, their sunglasses looked more sinister than silly. They checked his driver’s licence, car registration and credit cards, made a phone call, and only then allowed him through.
A disquieting thought occurred to Allison: how the hell could he shoot exterior scenes in a war movie, when white actors would sunburn in minutes and risk snow blindness in an hour? Make-up — he’d have to get his make-up people working on it. Most of the filmmakers he knew were convinced everything would be back to normal by spring; Allison’s intuition told him nothing would be back to normal for a long time. And he trusted his intuition. Three times now, he had guessed — known — what kind of movie would be popular in two years, and each time he’d been right. The last one, Gunship, had been such a screaming success that he’d let himself be pressured into another war movie even though it hadn’t felt right.
The hell with it. The Longrangers had a good script, a small cast and a modest budget. It would still turn a profit and stir up the critics. Then he could sit back and choose the next project without so much hassle —
Doublethinking. The world is coming to an end tomorrow, but next week will be fair and warmer.
He parked outside the Officers’ Club, a rambling two-story building with the mandatory stucco walls and red-tile roof, and walked slowly across the lot to the front doors. Discipline. You don’t lose your cool, you don’t run, least of all when you’ll get wet anyway.