Selection Event (10 page)

“Walruses.”

“You cut the heads off walruses.”

“For the tusks. Ivory. I'd get a pack of dope a head, last me ten days, twelve or thirteen if I scrimp. But I never skrimpted.”

They drove a few miles in silence. The fences were down in many places, and sheep grazed in the wide highway divider.

“Where d'you get your dope now?” Martin asked, though he suspected he knew the answer.

“Curtiz. That's why I want to be back early. You hungry?”

“Very.”

“I'm going to speed up,” Ryan said, “and then you can go in the back and get something to eat. If you mess with me that way, see, I'll crash and you'll probably die. Mr. Curtiz told me to do it this way.”

“Wouldn't you die too?” Martin asked.

“So?”

Ryan said nothing more till he got the van up to 90; it wavered in the wind. Then he said, “Okay, now.”

Martin unsnapped his belt and climbed into the back. He never thought he could put lunchmeat between two slices of bread so fast. Then he got back in the passenger seat and snapped on the seatbelt.

“Thanks,” Martin said, trying to remember to chew and not just swallow chunks.

“I don't eat much myself,” Ryan answered, slowing down to 60. “I kind of lost the taste for it.”

Chapter 15

Diaz stood up, knocked the dirt and gravel out of his clothes, rinsed the blood off the heels of his hands in some ditch-water at the side of the road, and thought, “Didn't even hurt! I got the power in me!”

Outside Reno, he'd slalomed a corner on sand and gravel, watched the bike slide sideways from under him, then, momentarily airborn, he broad-backed off the shoulder, skidded across some loose dirt and rolled off into a shallow ditch.

On a rush, on a roll, he restarted the bike, baby-talked it, and spun-out, heading east, into the rolling desert hills, the sand, the sage brush, and the scrub, flat out, a hundred and ten, clean smooth rich desert air pressed into his face like a woman's breasts.

“Go go go!” he screamed, bugs popping on his front teeth, engine throbbing between his legs, “Go mama go mama go mama!” everything cool and hot, nerves zinging, eyeballs tight in his head, hundred and fifteen now, engine doing its high-pitched
“eeeeeeeeeeee!”
Wind screamed over his ears, and Diaz screamed back, up one hill, faster down the backside, up another, east, faster into the sun, across the continent!

Chapter 16

Oakland looked like a battle had raged from street to street. Most of the stores had been looted, many of them burned out, and twice they had to detour around street-wide barricades of cars. Martin held a map on his knees and tried to direct Ryan to their destination, but many of the street signs had been cut off their poles and other streets were impassable.

“We could tell Curtiz we were there and the place was burned,” Martin said, but Ryan became immediately jumpy.

“He'll cut me off,” Ryan said.

It was all for nothing. The first address, Gun World, no longer existed. Most of the block had been reduced to chunks of smoke-blackened concrete. Iron grillwork stuck out of the rain-soaked rubble, protecting nothing from no one.

On his address paper, Ryan made a laborious note. Then he looked up at Martin. “See any women around here?”

Martin almost laughed. Instead, he said, “No, Ryan, I don't see any women. Out here in the rubble, in the rain — why aren't they standing around waiting for us?”

Ryan made another one-word notation.

Martin wondered how difficult and puzzling the world must seem to somebody with Ryan's impaired wits.

By ten o'clock, they found the second Oakland address, and Martin watched Ryan carefully write on his piece of paper, “Emptie.”

The building had not been burned, but it had been utterly gutted. Apparently, toward the end, others had also been collecting guns.

“Now what?” Martin asked.

“We go to Frisco.”

....

The Bay Bridge was eerily empty. Across the bay, the red spires of the Golden Gate were hidden in the steady rain and low clouds. A few cars were parked on the highest part of the suspension section of the bridge.

“Fliers,” Ryan said dully, as they passed by the empty cars. “It was a fad.”

As they drove nearer the city, the shrouded skyline looked the same as Martin remembered. Nearer the end of the bridge, on the downslope side, Martin was thinking that they could be driving into San Francisco on a normal day, and anytime they would hit the slower traffic, cars would be bumper to bumper.... But there was no traffic on the off-ramp, none on Mission Street, none down in the city itself as far as they could see, and Market Street was as lifeless as the first day of the world. The only movement was the small trees planted in the sidewalk, whipping in the winds that blew through the concrete canyons.

Along the streets, cars were parked as thickly as ever. More were double-parked than Martin remembered as normal, and occasionally, here and there, a body lay on the wet sidewalk, rotting inside its clothes.

“Lotta drugs here,” Ryan said. He looked at his paper and gave Martin the first address; it was nearby, in the Mission District.

The building was constructed of old brickwork. The front windows had been filled in with new bricks and the door had a heavy security grill over it.

 “Looks good,” Ryan said.

He took the lever-operated winch from the back of the van and hooked it up to chains he had Martin attach to the building's security grill and to a nearby fire hydrant. “You do the lever,” he said.

In the dark street, rain blew at them in gusts, stinging Martin's face and roaring in his ears, but Ryan worked casually, unhurriedly, as though it was a summer day.

After the chains tightened, it only took another six cranks to pull the grill off the doorway and Ryan did the rest with the crowbar.

Inside, the cool musty air smelled of wet carpeting and gun oil. Row on row of handguns filled the glass counter
—
nickel-plated and black, automatic and revolver, snub-nosed and long-barreled, and behind that, on the wall, hung shotguns, hunting rifles, wire-stock assault rifles with banana clips curved beneath them, two machine guns that looked like old Thompsons from the days of Prohibition, M-16's, and dozens of others Martin had never seen before. Off on one side, there were even several styles of crossbow, one of them pistol-sized.

“Jackpot,” Ryan breathed, his eyes as vacant as ever. Water ran out of his thin stringy hair and dripped off his chin. “He said I should check around for contraband. You load all this, I'll look in back.”

“Sure.” If Curtiz had this much firepower, someone, eventually, would be using it. But at the moment he had Max to consider. And for the time being, he would cooperate and do as he was told.

He took the crowbar to the counter and smashed it open. From the shards of glass, he picked out the handguns and put them in canvas bags, seventy-eight of them.

While he was prying the lock-bar off the rifle rack, Ryan came out of the back carrying three large shotguns.

“Full automatics,” he said as he passed through on his way to the van. “Street-sweepers.”

In half an hour, they had loaded everything, including two large cartons of ammunition. The van sagged on its back wheels.

“Now what?” Martin asked.

“We look for women.” He got the bullhorn from the back and rolled down his window. “Now you're supposed to drive. Drive around.”

“Sure,” Martin said. “I'll drive around.”

They drove around. Ryan held the bullhorn in the open window and read from a scrap of paper. “We have a settlement started. We have food and security. Come out and let's talk.” 

Along Parnassus Avenue, a young man with long hair and a beard stepped out of a building and waved with both hands over his head. He was grinning as though he had been saved.

“Speed up,” Ryan said. “Curtiz said just women.”

Martin did as he was told. They passed close enough he could see holes in the man's jacket and hear him yelling, “Hey! Wait up! Hey, over here!” He didn't know how lucky he was.

“I wonder what he thought about that,” Martin said a block later.

 “Who cares.” Again with the bullhorn: “We have a settlement started! We have....” And on and on.

“Jesus, Ryan, give it a pause between phrases, all right? You're driving me crazy with that thing.” 

He put the bullhorn in his lap and gazed passively straight ahead. They had turned the heater on and the windows were steamed.

“You have to do everything Curtiz says? He's a hundred miles away and I'm sure as hell not going to rat on you. What if he told you to shoot Max or me?”

“I'd shoot you or Max.”

“Of course. Because you believe in Curtiz and the future and New America.”

He turned and looked at Martin. For the first time there seemed to be life in his eyes. “You don't understand the first thing, man,” he said evenly, without anger. “Curtiz don't mean nothing to me. He's alive, he's dead, so what. New America don't mean nothing to me. The future?” Ryan grinned and showed his rotten teeth, but he was not amused. “The past is screwed, this is the present — look at it — and future's more of the same.”

“So why do anything Curtiz says? Why not leave? You like the food, or what?”

Martin was now driving through Golden Gate Park, but Ryan ignored the forest around them and stared straight ahead, looking at nothing. From the side of the street, an old man and a boy waved a rag at them, trying to flag them down. Martin glanced over at Ryan, but he shook his head. “Only women.”

There was only a light mist now, and they passed a couple of loose buffalo in the park, grazing alongside the street, puffing huge jets of steam from their nostrils. Ryan didn't see them.

“You probably think I'm a moron,” Ryan said, “not worth keeping alive. You might be right. But this world, man, everything in it, even though I survived and not many else did, it all means nothing to me. Like your monks who abandoned the world to think about god. I abandoned the world the first time I put god into my arm, and after that, I was a monk for junk. It was all I thought about. All I think about. I should wear a robe and sandals.”

He turned and grinned at Martin. “I'm a very religious guy. You didn't know that, did you. Life and death on this earth, it don't mean nothing to me. After you've experienced my god, this world is like a hole filled with shadows and shit — I can't wait to leave it behind. It's a real simple religion, real direct. No arguments, no organization, no rules, we don't persecute anybody, we don't try to convert anybody. We junkies never started no wars. Junkies don't even have guns.” He laughed. “Give a junkie a gun, he'll sell it. We sell everything, being very humble people. I get god in me, I experience it, god leaves, I look for god. It's that simple. You normal people don't care if we get shot or knifed or beat to death or get AIDS. We don't even care that much ourselves. How's that fit into your middle class moral scheme?”

“I'm not sure what my moral scheme is. But I know I don't like people like Curtiz locking me up and pretending to be doing me a favor.”

“I only have one master,” Ryan said, picking up the bullhorn, “and it ain't Curtiz and he knows it. But him and me, we got corresponding value systems. “Hello! Hello! We are friendly!”

Just before 3:30, they saw a woman standing beside the street, arms at her sides, watching them. “Pull over,” Ryan told Martin.

He stopped beside her and Ryan opened the door. “We got food if you're hungry,” he said.

The woman could have been twenty or forty. She wore a dirty green nylon jacket over a baggy white dress, no shoes, and she was soaked. She had the hood of the jacket pulled up, but it covered only the back half of her head and her hair hung in dripping strings around her face.

“Come on, get in,” Ryan said. “We got a warm place to go to. Electricity, all the comforts of home.”

Martin considered putting the van in gear and flooring it, but he'd still have Ryan to deal with, who would probably try to kill him if he acted up, and Curtiz had said he would turn Max out at ten o'clock. So he waited and hoped the woman would turn and run.

Instead, she nodded minutely.

“Good,” Ryan said. He reached behind him and opened the side door. “Just get in. There's a blanket back there. Eat whatever you want.”

Without a word she got in, wrapped the blanket around herself, huddled on the floor and leaned against the side of the van. Ryan slid the door shut and rechecked his piece of paper.

“Okay,” he said. “Head back downtown.”

“What for?”

Ryan looked across at him as he folded the paper. “Don't ask a junkie 'What for?'”

Halfway down McAllister Street, still in an area of old wall-to-wall clapboard apartments, Ryan said, “Stop here.”

Martin stopped.

Ryan said “Excuse me” several times to the woman as he unhooked one of the five gallon cans of gasoline and then rummaged around for a couple of the road flares. “Be right back,” he said, taking the things into one of the buildings.