Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) (27 page)

“
It’s
men from
the city,” Yorovich said.
 

“After food, you think?”

“Obviously.
 
Winter’s coming.
 
There isn’t much left to pillage anywhere
else.”
 

“We could buy them off with the canned
goods we don’t need.
 
But to hell with
that.”
 

“You’re right, Jerry.
 
You can’t buy peace from the savages.
 
We fight it out right now, or they’ll destroy
us sooner or later.”
 

When dusk came, we were attacked by a
second force, which had lain outside the village.
 
The men escaped from the barricaded store and
the two groups formed a united front against us.
 
The fighting was continuous until nearly
dawn.
 
Our superior weapons eventually
forced them to retreat.
 

We rested after the night’s fighting
until noon before we set out in pursuit of the invaders.
 
Fifty of us went in our two big diesel
vans.
 

Our war against the barbarians was short-lived
and very one-sided.
 
Although we faced an
enemy outnumbering us five to one, we had superior weapons—and Psorkarian, in
the helicopter, gave us an air force.
 
By
late afternoon we had taken nearly sixty prisoners.
 

The brigand stronghold had been the
undamaged mansions on the ocean boulevard overlooking Los Angeles harbor.
 
We were still rounding up four prisoners on
the beach below the bluff, when the helicopter swung low overhead and
Psorkarian called out my name.
 

“Yes, Cossack?”
I shouted up to
him.
 
“What is it?”

“A ship of some sort,
Jerry.
 
Just outside the
breakwater.”
 

“Armed?”

“Damned if I know.
 
I never saw anything like this before.”
 

An hour later I understood what he
meant.
 
The monstrosity maneuvered
through the harbor entrance, past the flattop sunk against the breakwater, and
moved toward the beach.
 
It was a
box-like raft with a sail.
 
The sail was
a crazy patchwork of varicolored cloth hitched together with woven palm
fronds.
 
Along each side of the raft a
superstructure held hand-carved
oars which
six men
were plying.
 
The thing stopped fifty
feet offshore.
 

From the deck of the raft a man shouted
at us, “Who are you?”

“Americans,” I answered.
 

“You survived in the city?”

“No; we’re from the hills.”
 

“We’re looking for a man.
 
You may have heard of him—Jerry Bonhill.”
 

“Why?”

“He broadcast to the city.
 
He told us how—”

“I’m Bonhill!
 
come
ashore.”
 

The raft ground on the
beach.
 
The man sprang ashore and shook my hand
eagerly.
 
He was emaciated, gray-bearded,
yet still very distinguished looking.
 
His face had been tanned leather-brown by the sun and the wind.
 
He told me his name was Maurice Phelps, of
the U. S. Navy.
 

He described the destruction of Los
Angeles.
 
The navy, he said, had entered
the harbor without opposition.
 
All day
long, before the attack, they had been hearing broadcasts which began, “I am
Jerry Bonhill; I am speaking for George Knight.”
 
At first they thought it was a trick, but
Soviet sailors in the submarines —sick men, barely able to stand—welcomed them
as friends.
 

However, the Soviet commander had a
hard-core defense of about three thousand men—out of the quarter million in the
city.
 
Russian planes bombed the incoming
ships; the navy drove them off.
 
As the
Angelinos and their sick captors moved toward the harbor, the Russians bombed
the city indiscriminately with explosives and incendiary bombs.
 
The navy attempted to evacuate both civilians
and friendly Soviet troops.
 
The first
wave of sick men was loaded into Phelps’ ship, and he was ordered to take them
to Catalina.
 

Phelps’ ship was in the channel, five
miles west of the breakwater, when the sound of firing suddenly stopped in the
city.
 
On the horizon they could see the
flames of the burning city, but Phelps remembered hearing the motor of only
one plane soaring over the ruins.
 

Ten minutes after that Phelps’ ship
exhausted its last reserve of fuel.
 
He
had no choice but to drop anchor.
 
Half
an hour later a Russian submarine surfaced close to Phelps’ ship.
 
Ten Russian sailors asked to come
aboard—emaciated by the radiation sickness; a terrible horror in their
eyes.
 
They were the last men who escaped
the city.
 
They had been aboard the
submarine when they heard ashore the cry of “Gas!”
 
Instinctively they slammed the hatches and
submerged.
 
Through the periscope they
saw the people on the landing fall dead.
 
They saw the ships one by one go out of control.
 
They watched the war-god in the gas mask
slaughter a city.
 
The
last city of man, which Knight’s dream had almost saved.
 

Since the submarine had the almost
inexhaustible power of atomic engines, Phelps used it to make repeated trips
ferrying his men and the refugees to Catalina Island.
 
Approximately half the men aboard his ship
were Communist troops; the other evacuees were Americans who insisted on
sticking by the sick enemy they were trying to help.
 
“A remarkable display of courage,” Phelps
admitted.
 
“But the whole city was like
that; the spiritual excitement of a Crusade.
 
All of them talked constantly about Knight.”
 

The sea was running high and on its last
trip back to the ship the submarine, manned by an exhausted crew, rammed
it.
 
Both vessels began to sink.
 
Phelps and the fifteen seamen still aboard
went ashore on a life raft.
 
The island
was a shambles, swept by fire.
 

“Our first year out there was rugged,
Bonhill—pure hell.
 
Half of us died of
the sickness and starvation.
 
But
through it all we never forgot those broadcasts to the city.
 
It gave us something beyond ourselves to
work for.
 
We had the Russians with us;
we saw what it meant to teach them the meaning of America—our revolution, in
place of the Communist sham.”
 

During the second summer they managed to
grow a little food, but the Catalina colony had existed close to
starvation.
 
Fish was their staple diet;
but the spirit of George Knight kept them alive.
 

The refugees had spent a good part of
the summer building Phelps’ raft.
 
The
old life raft, which they had used for fishing, was in no condition to make
the passage to the mainland.
 
Before
another winter came, they wanted to leave the island.
 
Phelps and his six sailors had come to find a
larger ship, which would be capable of moving the whole colony.
 
Like the Wawona refugees, they surmised that
I might have built a colony like theirs.
 
They were ready to join forces.
 
I
told him they would be welcome to the valley, and I explained how much
progress we had made toward rebuilding an organized society.
 

“So it’s President Bonhill.”
 
He said it with an embarrassing reverence.
 
“The first President of the
American world—for the new breed of American.
 
You’ll find us everywhere.
 
In Russia and Africa.
 
In Brazil and Ireland.
 
It is our world, Bonhill; we won’t lose it
again.”
 

Phelps and his six sailors examined the
ships in the harbor.
 
They found what
they could use.
 
We worked half the night
helping them drain fuel from other rusting hulks to fill the tanks of that one
vessel.
 
They sailed immediately.
 
Phelps thought he could land his Catalina
colony in Los Angeles shortly after dawn.
 

I lay awake a long time looking at the
stars, hazy above the coastal mists.
 
I
felt an inner peace and satisfaction; the last question mark was gone.
 
George Knight had not failed in Los
Angeles.
 
One man had destroyed the city,
yet even here Knight’s dream had not died.
 

At seven the next morning, when the
thin, wasted survivors of the Catalina colony came ashore, our trucks were
waiting on the road above the beach.
 
It
was a three-hour drive up the road to the valley.
 
I sat with the driver in the cab of one of
the trucks; the pale, gaunt people crowded in the van behind us were singing as
we moved over the highways of the dead city.
 

When we reached the village the air was
crisp and cold.
 
Snow clouds were
scattered over the sky.
 
Our citizens
welcomed the newcomers soberly, as friends and as brothers.
 
They took them in and fed them.
 

I walked back to our cabin with
Cheryl.
 
The afternoon sun blazed through
the windows.
 
Our first winter fire
burned on the hearth.
 

I dropped on the couch beside
Cheryl.
 
“The prisoners Yorovich brought
in,” she said.
 
“I thought if we put
them—”

“We have an elected government,
Cheryl.
 
The responsibility isn’t all
ours any longer.”
 
I put my arm around
her.
 
“It seems to me we were interrupted
yesterday—”

“And it isn’t right for the President
to leave unfinished business.
 
It sets a
bad precedent for our children.”

Her fingers worked at the buttons of my
shirt.
 
I felt her hand caress my chest
and move slowly toward the small of my back.
 

“Never a new world,” I murmured in her
ear.
 
“A man and a woman together—they
found it long ago.”
 

She sighed and then, crooning
deep-throatedly, she whispered Solomon’s song, the ancient magic of love,

“‘Behold, thou art fair, my beloved…
 
The beams of our house are cedar, and our
rafters of fir.’”

And after that she had no more time for
words.
 

THE END

Irving E. Cox, Jr.,
1917-2001