There were maybe twenty of them. They ran out of the house, circling Paige and Eric like Indians attacking a wagon train. Only they didn't attack. They stood still, each holding something to use as a weapon. A hammer, a saw, a hunk of firewood, a screwdriver, a fork.
The oldest was a girl of about fifteen. She wore a tattered but clean dress and a full-length apron. Her blond hair hung down her back almost to her waist. The weapon she was brandishing was a wooden spatula.
The rest of the children stood silently, obviously waiting for her command. The youngest was about three. He carried a sharp stick that reminded Eric of roasting hot dogs.
"Hi," the oldest girl said. Her voice was neutral, her eyes wary. She gripped the spatula tightly as she studied Paige's and Eric's automatic weapons.
"Hi," Paige replied. "We don't mean you any harm."
The girl waved the spatula at the guns. "Then put those things down."
"Can't do that," Eric said. "We're being followed by some men who want to kill us."
The girl shrugged. It wasn't her problem. "Then maybe you should go."
"What's your name?' Paige asked her. "My name's Paige."
One of the young boys giggled. "Page? Like in a book?"
"Yes," Paige said.
Several of the children giggled.
"I'm Wendy," the girl said. "What do you want?"
"We're looking for a man, an older man in his sixties. About my height, gray hair and a thick moustache. He used to live here."
Wendy shook her head. "No adults live here. Just us kids."
"No adults?"
"That's right."
Eric could see Paige trying not to show her disappointment, but her shoulders sagged and her eyes were shining with held-back tears. He stepped toward Wendy and all the other children lifted their weapons and stepped toward him. He looked at them and stopped. "May we come inside and look around? The man we're looking for used to live here. Maybe he left something behind to tell us where he's gone."
"There's lots of stuff inside. We just left most of it."
Paige brightened. "May we look?" Wendy hesitated, studying their faces with a child's skeptical eye. She looked at the guns again and sighed as if she had no choice. "I guess. Only don't mess things up, OK? We've been cleaning all morning. Peter will be back soon."
"Peter?" Eric said.
"Yeah. He's out hunting. Me and Peter take care of everyone. Kinda like their parents, see."
"What happened to everybody's real parents?"
"I dunno. Dead. I guess. Peter and I were on a field trip with some other students from Uni High in L.A. We were studying tide pools for Mrs. Levy's biology class. Then the quakes hit and most everybody else in the class was killed. Mrs. Levy fell into the ocean and got pulled out to sea. Me and Peter started running. We passed this junior high school and tried to steal a couple bikes so we could get away faster. The whole building had collapsed. Dead kids and teachers everywhere. We grab the bikes and start pedaling out of there when we see some kids wandering around bawling. They'd been on the playground of some elementary school when it hit. With everybody around us dead, they started following me and Peter. We finally ended up here."
"Was it empty when you got here?"
"Sure. Otherwise we wouldn't have stayed, right? The place was a mess, I can tell you that. It's bad enough picking up after all these kids, but when the place was so gross to start… Well, I guess we can't complain. At least we have a home now."
Eric and Paige exchanged looks.
"So you and Peter have been taking care of all these kids by yourselves?' Eric asked.
"We ain't babies," one of the boys snapped. He was about eleven.
"We do our share," one of the girls, ten, added.
There was some muttered approval among the others.
"All rights, that's enough," Wendy scolded gently. "Let's wash those grimy little paws and get ready for lunch. I haven't been slaving over a hot fire all day for nothing, right?"
The kids scattered to behind the house.
"Got a pump back there," Wendy explained. "Whoever was here before rigged it up. We get all the water we need. I guess that's why we never left. Here at least we can eat and drink."
Eric nodded, looked around. "And you're pretty isolated, too. Ever bothered by strangers?"
"Up here?" She laughed. "Nope. Oh, once some couple and their kid wandered by, wanted to stay and take over from me and Pete. But the kids voted them down and they moved on. Thing is-" she grinned-"their kid wanted to stay with us. They dragged him away crying and screaming."
"Sounds like you've made quite a home here," Eric said.
"We have. Better than some these kids came from. Sure, sometimes we miss our folks, and we've had a few runaways go off looking for their parents. But mostly we just take care of each other." She looked at her watch. "I gotta get back to the cooking now. You wanna come in and look around, fine." She turned and walked back into the house, leaving the door open for Paige and Eric to follow.
"Jesus," Paige said.
"Yeah," Eric said.
They walked into the house.
The inside was consciously rustic. Lots of clumpy wooden furniture and rough wood walls. Even the ceiling was bare beams. Walking into this house gave Eric a funny feeling. Everything was so neat and normal looking, he could almost forget there had been a disaster.
Wendy strolled straight through the living room and dining room out into the kitchen. A little girl with pigtails peeked around the corner at Eric and Paige. She hugged a doll made out of a stuffed sock and button eyes.
"Hi," Eric said.
She smiled, hugged the doll closer.
"What's your name?"
"Sarah," she mumbled into her sock doll.
"What's his name?" Eric pointed at the doll.
"I dunno."
"Come on."
"Rupert, I guess."
Paige was rummaging through the drawers of the oak desk in the corner by the old TV console. The TV screen was dust-free and the rusty rabbit ears still formed a neat V, even though there was no electricity, no TV stations broadcasting. She struggled with one drawer, finally forcing it open. Like the rest of the drawers, it was stuffed with papers. "Hey, Eric, how about giving me a hand here, huh? Play Mr. Charm later."
Sarah frowned at Eric. "Is she your mother?'
Eric laughed.
Paige shook her head disgustedly. "Kids."
Eric winked at Sarah and she giggled and ran into the kitchen. He walked over to Paige and started pulling wads of folded paper from the drawers.
"Wendy must've just shoved everything that Dad had lying on the desk into these drawers. Christ, she may be even a bigger neat freak than I am."
"Is this how you remember the place?' "Pretty much. Same furniture and everything. It's just cleaner than I've ever seen it. It's like some TV household. Like on Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show. Know what I mean?'
Eric nodded.
She glanced around the room fondly. "Still, I guess they're just making the best home they can. Did a hell of a job, I'd say."
Eric unfolded papers with scrawled mathematical equations, handed them to Paige. "This look like anything?"
She looked at them, tossed them on top of the desk. "Doodles. Some of these are scraps of ideas, but not the whole blueprint. Not even enough to make much sense."
Eric walked over to one of the bookshelves that lined an entire wall of the living room. A Sanyo cassette tape recorder held up a row of Britannica encyclopedias. Eric lifted it from the shelf and a couple volumes collapsed. There was a tape already in the machine. Eric pressed Play. Nothing happened.
"Batteries are dead," Wendy said from the doorway. "They weren't when we got here, but one of the kids played some Peter, Paul and Mary tape that was in there and left it on overnight. We couldn't find any more batteries."
Sarah stood behind Wendy, still hugging the sock doll to her throat. "I didn't mean to do it," she whined.
"Never mind, Sarah," Wendy said. "It doesn't matter. We can still sing same as always. Don't need batteries for that." She pointed at the ancient upright piano in the dining room.
"You play?" Eric asked.
"I'm teaching myself. When there's time." She smiled proudly. "Meantime, I read stories to the children at night from those books." She pointed to a stack next to the worn easy chair. The top one was Peter Pan.
"Oh," Eric said. Of course. Peter and Wendy. "What's your real name, Wendy?"
The girl who called herself Wendy smiled. "Grace Yedonski. Ugh. I like Wendy better."
"What about Peter?"
"Louis Southern. But don't call him anything but Peter, OK? Makes him mad."
"OK."
"Look," Wendy said, "I'd appreciate it if you'd hurry up and find what you came for. Peter will be back soon and he doesn't like strangers. Gets the kids all stirred up."
"Must be hard on you," Paige said, "taking care of so many children."
Wendy shrugged. "It's not bad. They need me."
"We're almost done, Wendy," Eric said. "A few more minutes. OK?"
She hesitated, nibbled her bottom lip, then nodded. "OK. But hurry." She went back to the kitchen, Sarah trotting behind her.
"You might think this is funny," Paige said, staring after Wendy, "but I kind of admire her. The way she and this Peter kid take care of all these children."
"They seem to really care," Eric agreed.
"Yeah, well, while she is scrubbing and cooking and keeping these kids alive, it's time for us more mature adults to get back to the really important task of finding some stupid papers."
Eric pointed at her backpack. "Got any batteries in there?"
"In my flashlight, sure."
"Hand 'em over."
"They won't fit that thing."
"They will when I'm done." Eric pulled some wires from the back of the stereo and adjusted them to the small recorder. Within a few minutes he had the Sanyo working. He popped in one of the Judy Collins tapes. Judy Collins sang "Both Sides Now."
"So much for that theory, eh, master spy?" Paige said.
Eric punched the Fast Forward button, then Play. Judy Collins singing "Send in the Clowns." He repeated this several times. Finally he got something else. Obviously a home taping of someone playing the piano, clumsily picking out single notes.
Paige stopped fussing with the papers in the desk and listened.
"Your dad know how to play the piano?"
"The way you and I breathe. That can't be him. The notes don't make any musical sense, they sound like random plunking."
"Code, maybe. Notes corresponding with letters and numbers."
"Of course!"
Eric ejected the tape. "He must've figured someone would come for him, but he probably couldn't be sure. So he put it all in code on these tapes."
"But where is he? He wouldn't have just left them in the truck."
"He might have. Maybe he came back here for something to fix the flat, but when he got back to the truck, someone was unloading it. They might've been armed and he didn't want to risk getting shot by looters, so he ran. The tapes sure weren't worth his life, especially when he could always make more."
Paige sat on the edge of the desk. "Yeah, that's possible. Otherwise, he would have left some sign, some way for us to find him."
Eric looked at his watch. "There's not enough time for us to look for him right now. We'll have to take the tapes back. Maybe there's something on them about where he was heading. They can always send someone back after him."
Paige stared at him. "You know better. Once they have this, that's the end of it."
The front door swung open with a thud and a tall, skinny boy of sixteen strode in with a scowl on his face. "What's going on? Who are you?" He pulled a rust-pocked machete from his belt.
"Hold on," Eric said, raising his hands. "Peter, right?"
Wendy came bustling out from the kitchen, Sarah in tow. "It's all right, Peter. They don't want to hurt us."
Peter didn't look like he was buying that as he walked slowly toward Eric, interested not in the HK 93, but in the crossbow slung over Eric's back.
"Neat," he said, for a moment reverting back to his own age. But when he looked at Wendy the burden of responsibility crowded aside his youthful features and he was scowling again, brandishing his machete. "What do you want?"
"This house used to belong to my father-"
"Well, we live here now," Peter said. "And we ain't leaving."
"I don't want you to," Paige continued. "We were just looking for something that might tell us where he's gone." Paige described him. "Have you seen him?"
Peter thought about it for a while. "Moustache, huh? Saw this body over near the ravine, had a moustache. He was old, had some gray."
Paige looked pained. "What about his eyes? What color?"
Peter shrugged. "Dunno. He didn't have no eyes anymore. Birds got to 'em, I guess." He made a pecking motion with his fingers.
Paige lunged another step toward him and he reflexively lifted the machete at her. "How old was he?"
"Old. Maybe forty."
Paige sighed. "Christ. Kids."
"We're not fucking kids, lady," Peter exploded. "We're a family. You got the fancy weapons, so if you're gonna use 'em, go ahead. Otherwise, get your asses outta here."
"Language, Peter," Wendy clucked.
Eric looked at Paige. "Let's go."
"Not yet. Look, Peter, I'm sorry. You and Wendy have done a terrific job here. I mean that."
Peter accepted the compliment with the same proud expression that Wendy had shown earlier. "We done all right."
"So let us stay a few minutes longer. Let me try to work out some of the message on these tapes with your piano." She looked at Eric. "Maybe there's something on here about where he was going."
Eric looked at his watch.
"It's probably a very simple code, Eric," she pleaded. "Just give me half an hour."
Eric gestured at Peter. "It's your house, man. What do you say?"
Peter and Wendy exchanged glances, little smiles. It was the same kind of silent exchanges Eric and Annie used to have. That secret language of lovers.
"Half an hour," Peter agreed. "In exchange for that fancy bow."
Eric started to shake his head, saw the desperate look in Paige's eyes, and sighed. "OK."
Peter clapped his hands together and rubbed them happily. "Right. Why don't we let your lady alone in here while we go outside and you show me how to shoot that thing."
Eric stroked his scar, his mouth grim. Sure, he had the HK 93 now, but he'd had the crossbow since the quakes. It had saved his life several times. He didn't like parting with it.
Paige carried the cassette player to the piano, lifted the lid, and turned back to Eric. When she spoke, her voice was husky with emotion. "Thanks, Eric."
Eric tossed the two cassettes to her and followed Peter out the door.
Paige sat at the piano, listening to the tape, matching the notes on the piano, scribbling them down on paper. She broke the code immediately. It was simple, just as she'd thought. Each letter of the alphabet corresponded to a note on the piano. She had a couple sentences written when she heard a noise behind her. Startled, she turned around.
"Hi," Sarah said, cradling her sock doll, Rupert.
"Hi, Sarah." Paige smiled, turning back to her work. Cute kid, she thought, then was lost again in the code, forgetting Sarah was even there.
Sarah took tiny steps toward Paige. When she was only a foot behind her, Sarah reached inside her sock doll and pulled out a corroded pipe wrench. Some of the stuffing came out with the wrench. She picked clumps of stuffing from the wrench and carefully tucked them back into her sock doll. When that was done, she lifted the wrench over her head with both hands and brought it down on the back of Paige's head.
Wendy stepped out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She looked at Paige lying on the floor and at Sarah standing there with the bloody wrench. She smiled at Sarah. "Good girl, Sarah. Good girl."