Selection Event (22 page)

“I'm sorry. About her. For her.” Finally, the blue smudge disappeared and Martin turned and went back into the house.

“I'll leave, if you'd like,” Winch said, still holding back, standing in the doorway. “If you want to be alone after all this.”

They stood there a moment, unsure of what to say to each other.

“No,” Martin said. “Aloneness is always plentiful. Help me look for Mona, will you? You saw her on the mantle — a black manx.”

“Sure. Be glad to help. Good friends are hard to come by, no matter how many legs they got.”

Chapter 37

Isha knew her pet was not inside, but once outdoors, outside the fence and circling, she found no trace of her scent, so she widened the circumference of her search, nose to the ground, plowing through the taller grass. Several times during a circle, she would raise her head and make her slurring, here-I-am bark and then look round her for movement. Then she would circle again, sometimes picking up the scent of strange animals that made the ridge of her back bristle, but she moved on, circling wider still, barking again, and watching for movement, circling.

Mona's smell hit her all at once, the smell of her fur and her fresh blood. The hair on the back of Isha's head raised in a bristle. She circled the area when she again smelled Mona's blood. But which direction did her pet go?

Isha moved carefully now so she wouldn't obliterate the scent with her own or with crushed grass or disturbed dirt. She turned in tight, body-wide circles, touching stems of grass with her nose until she caught the bad scent again. She looked back at the first place she had scented Mona, then at this place, and then moved more assuredly in the direction the places led.

Again she caught a touch of the smell Mona carried in her black fur. In her mind, she saw Mona leaping from one spot to another, unlike how she herself would move. Her head down, she moved steadily now, tail switching in the weeds behind her.

White fangs in a black mouth spit-hissed in her face. Mona reared up on her long back legs, ears flattened, ready to slash into whatever appeared in front of her.

Isha recoiled, frightened only an instant, and then crouched down on her belly and panted happily. Mona came down on her four feet and walked stiff-legged in a tight circle, her back still fluffed and ridged, making her look half again larger than she was. She gave Isha two quick sidelong glances and then ignored her and moved on, through high weeds, away from their house.

Isha walked up next to her and pushed Mona off balance with her nose, exploring her for the smell of blood. The smell came from a small place on her head. Isha tried to lick it clean, but Mona growled at her and kept moving in the same direction.

Isha walked astraddle of her pet, trying to distract her, and then reached down and nipped her on the scruff of her neck. Mona ducked lower and sprinted ahead. Isha followed, but Mona would only growl and keep moving.

When Isha raised her head to orient herself, she saw the object of her pet's pursuit. Ahead, Isha saw the woman who had lived with them. Isha lowered her head and walked more carefully, more silently.

The woman did not move fast and she stopped frequently. She always talked, so it was not necessary to even watch for her or search for her scent.

The woman dropped a jacket and Mona passed by it, paying it no attention, in her single-minded pursuit. Isha stopped and pushed her nose into it, smelling not only the sharp odor of the woman but the good smell of the man she lived with. She wanted to go back, but she couldn't go back without her pet — who was now far ahead of her, in the street, slinking along beside a parked car.

Long after it had become dark, the woman found an open place beside some large buildings where there was a wide dry surface marked with many straight lines. She lay down in the middle of it, on her back, still making noises to herself. Around them, crickets screeched and overhead glowed the white smudge of the moon. Mona waited unmoving behind a car tire, until the woman was quiet and still. Then, with her belly nearly touching the hard surface of the ground, Mona moved toward her, cautious step by cautious step.

Isha watched.

Chapter 38

In the white light of the hissing gas lantern, Martin held Mona on his lap and with a peroxide-moistened cotton ball he dabbed at the wound on the side of her head. At his feet, Isha sat, panting as she attentively watched his hands and occasionally glanced up at his face.

“She look okay?” Winch asked, picking his teeth. They'd come back from their futile search two hours before, put together a decent dinner, and had been sitting talking about the weather, working on the second bottle of wine, when they heard Isha barking at the front gate. Outside, two sets of eyes looked in at them.

Martin put his hand on Mona's side. “She's purring like crazy, so I guess she's all right.”

“I've heard stories about manxes,” Winch said. “All of them good, if you like an animal that's dog-smart and thinks like a cat. And that's some dog you got there, to go out and find her like that.” He wiped the toothpick on his shirtsleeve and dropped it into his shirt pocket.

“Was my parents' dog.” Martin put the cotton ball aside and moved his hands over the cat, feeling for anything unusual. From between her split claws he pulled several pieces of hair. He thought about that for an instant and figured that she had swiped at Moreen when the woman had done to her whatever she had tried to do.

Mona sprang off his lap, sat on the floor, and began washing her face. Isha nuzzled her anxiously, licked her and then sat with her ears up watching her.

“What do you suppose they've been doing out there?” Winch said.

Mona had settled in an arched lump under Isha's watchful gaze, her eyes closing to slits. Martin thought about the hair he had pulled from her claws. Dogs considered humans to be their gods, but cats never suffered that illusion.

“Maybe—” Martin said but then broke off. “Who knows.”

They left it at that.

....  

The next morning as they drank coffee and watched the night's rainclouds drift apart, Martin said, “I think we should make an effort to get us a little more company.”

“Bored with my conversation already?”

“Hardly. How about we take a drive over to the East Bay, circle around to Sacramento, then come back. Take a couple of days and see what or who we find.”

“I'd think after your experience with Moreen, you might want to cool out a bit.”

“Life is short.”

“You've noticed.”

“Ready?”

“Is my hair okay?”

Part Four

 
The Fall of Artifice
 

Chapter 39

Along the freeway, where Martin had seen hundreds of cattle and sheep when he had come this way as Ryan's hostage, there were now only dozens. Either they were thinning out as they spread or predators had been at them. Winch was intrigued by what he first thought were dogs trotting alongside the empty freeway. But whenever the car got within a hundred yards of them, they vanished.

“Coyotes,” Martin said. “Aggressive survivors. They're moving back in.”

Once, just before they turned into the Coast Range, Martin saw something moving near several head of cattle — something low in the weeds, something tan-backed and slinking — a mountain lion, a hundred miles from where it had lived a year ago.

The coast range was a jungle. When he had come over the Altamont Pass as Ryan's hostage, the normally barren mountain sides were green, but now the green had grown into tall clumps of grasses and weeds and had merged with the scattered trees till it looked more like Oregon than California.

“Weird weather,” Winch said. “I've never seen it look this good over here.”

The earth would take care of itself. It would balance and rebalance, there would be death and rebirth... but whether it would include human beings remained to be seen.

Oakland and Berkeley were disaster areas. What had not been looted had been burned, and from the appearance of the debris, the burning had probably happened prior to the rainy weather, before the final human gasp had sounded. Right up to the end, people had victimized each other, the stronger stealing from the weaker.

Berkeley was worse. Martin and Winch stood in the midst of the University, awed by the frenzy of destruction that must have taken place. It had been utterly destroyed. Winch pointed out a low area.

“See that? I'd say something big went off here. Left kind of a crater. And see how the library got its front side blown in. Something big.”

Inside, thousands of books that hadn't burned had been ruined by the rains. Between the rebar-spiked chunks of cement and fire-blackened plasterboard lay half-burned book covers, pieces of wet pages, a shelf bracket, ends of florescent bulbs, the debris of education.

Martin picked up a shred of a book page and read it: “...the faint breeze-crinkled notes of the piano, he looked at all the things here, at the vineyard, the row of eucalyptus trees, the crows, the bright grass, the sprinklers and their rainbows, at the appearance of solidity and weird grace, at this asylum without fences” —and the scrap ended. What writer had spent his time writing the words, for whom, and for what purpose? Martin was saddened more than he would have expected.

“Used to be a good library, I heard,” Winch said quietly.

“One of the best.”

“There must've been people who really hated this place.”

“Let's drive around some more.” Martin had to get away from the place. This was too graphic a demonstration of what he sadly remembered from all parts of the old world: People hated the ideas they disagreed with and, given the chance, would have removed competing ideologues from the face of the earth. Some, apparently, thought they had at last been given the chance.

They drove up into the hills behind the University, honking the car horn three quick blasts every block or so then listening half a minute for any response. As they drove, Martin had been thinking of the destroyed library.

“We have to preserve books,” he said.

Winch nodded. “Some generation down the line will need what's in them. They'll need to know what we did right and what we did wrong.” He thought a second. “If there's any generation down the line.” Winch had his elbow out the window and was watching the houses and yards go by, looking for any sign of life. “I'm not seeing a lot of hope here,” he said. “Maybe there are pockets of people in some of the remote places in the Andes or Mongolia or the backwoods of Alaska or Canada.”

They drove through the winding streets for another half hour and finally, Martin suggested they stop and look through a few of the houses. “We can stretch our legs, maybe find something to drink or see some signs of survivors.”

 A few of the homes still housed their dead, people rotting in their beds or in front of their televisions. One place had been the scene of a shoot-out — a man dead in the entryway, blood splattered on the wall behind him, and another man, probably the owner, in the kitchen, at the end of an old trail of blood, decomposed beyond stink. Later in the day, in a house surrounded by trees and dense foliage, they found a library that took up almost the entire bottom floor. There was even a wall of plastic-wrapped magazines that went back to the 1920s. It wasn't the University of California library, but it was worth making a note of. Martin wrote down the address and stuck the paper in his pocket.

The house had a terrace around the upper floor, and from there they could look through the green gloom down into a ravine to moss covered rocks. Martin saw movement in the undergrowth and nudged Winch. Silently, almost holding their breath, they watched a troop of five gorillas, two of them younger and smaller, pick their way through the trees. Their leader was twice as large as any of the others, and when they drew near the house, he looked up at the two men, paused and grunted, and continued their trek, unconcerned.

“They see the hairless apes and move on,” Winch said.

....  

Their impression of the entire East Bay area was that it was dead and had been abandoned by any survivors. Later in the day, they traveled north, through Concord and Vallejo where the lush, weed-choked hillsides were dotted with dozens of low cylindrical oil storage tanks. Some of them had burned, some had leaked and some had been damaged by explosions. Their contents had washed down the hillsides toward the bay, tarring the soil black.

They passed through an industrial area where great factories had exploded and burned, their toxic contents igniting and raining down on the countryside, killing all growth. The rains gouged and rutted the hillsides, washing the black-stained dirt toward the bay. The air stank. Crossing the poisoned landscape, neither of them said a word.

Approaching Sacramento on Interstate 80, they saw half a dozen pillars of black smoke rising above the city and then smearing south in the higher winds. It didn't look as though the works of man's hands and days were going to last very long.

Crossing the bridge over the Sacramento River, a collection of several draft horses, pigs, and chickens blocked the way. They seemed to be wandering across the bridge together, evidently quite comfortable in the confederation they had been born into and had lived with all their lives. Comfortable though it might be, Martin was thinking, it would provide the pigs and chickens with little protection from dog packs or coyotes.