That cannon up near the mouth of the tunnel boomed once more. The big iron ball it fired clanged off a boulder not far from the machine gun and crazily ricocheted away. One ol the men in the gun crew had some Old Time field glasses. He peered through them, then pointed. The machine gun started banging again.
Dan had no field glasses. Some of the machine-gun rounds were tracers, though. He could see where they went. The red flashes of fire led his eye straight to the cannon. The Old Time machine gun had at least as much range as the modern artillery piece. One after another, the men serving the cannon fell.
When the machine gun slopped shooting, some of the West-side artillerymen stood up. Replacements ran forward to help them fire the gun. The Valley machine gunner with the binoculars was waiting for that. As soon as the enemy gun crew was complete again, the machine gun roared back to life. More Westsiders went down. Dan didn't think they would rise till Judgment Day.
“Let's go!'“ Captain Kevin yelled. “They won't give us any trouble now!”
Cheering, the Valley men ran forward. Dan charged past the enormous dog's corpse. Blood puddled underneath it. Flies buzzed up in annoyance as the soldiers went past. They'd already started feeding on the body.
A few shots rang out from the Westsiders. They must have counted on the dog and the cannon to hold back the Valley troops. Now that that wasn't working, they didn't seem to have another plan. The pitiless machine gun picked off their men at a range from which they couldn't answer.
Some of the Valley soldiers started climbing up to the 405. Dan was one of them. What he saw when he got up there made him whoop and stomp his feet. The Valley men had outflanked the wall, which didn't stretch all the way across the pass. And the Westsiders were running as fast as they could.
Three
Sound really carried here. That was one of the first things Liz had noticed about this alternate. It had much less background noise than the home timeline did. No streets and freeways full of cars here. No TVs. No radios. Only a handful of windup record players. No factories, not really.
And so, when the fighting in the Sepulveda Pass got going, Liz and her family could try to figure out what was going on from what they heard. So could everybody else in Westwood.
One particular set of bangs made her father frown. “Somebody's got a heavy machine gun,” he said. “For a place like this. that's a very nasty weapon.”
“It's a very nasty weapon anywhere,” her mother said.
“Well, yeah.” Dad nodded. “But we've got even worse ones in the home timeline. Here, it's liable to be king of the hill. King of the pass, I mean.”
“Do you think it belongs to the Westside or the Valley?” Liz asked.
“Yes,” Dad said, deadpan.
“Thanks a lot.” She gave him a dirty look. “Which one, please?”
“Well, I didn't see it in Cal 's parade,” her father answered. “If he had one, he would have been proud to show it off, I think.”
“If the Valley has it…” Liz 's voice trailed away.
“If the Valley has it, the people here were really dumb to go to war,” Dad said. “Unless their hat has a rabbit in it, too.”
“Do you think it does?” she asked, adding, “I don't want anything to happen to UCLA.”
After some thought, Dad shrugged. “Hon, I just don't know. If they've got more stuff than they were showing, I haven't heard about it. But I don't know if I would. I'm just a tradesman, after all. If the big bosses have any brains, they'll keep secrets from people like me.”
“If the big bosses had any brains, they would've known the Valley's got a heavy machine gun, right?” Liz said.
Her father spread his hands. “Can't argue with you. I wish I could. I've never thought King Zev was real smart, but it's amazing how brilliant you look when you can shoot your enemies and they can't shoot you back.”
“Right,” Liz said.
When she went out into what had been West wood Village to shop for produce, everything seemed normal enough. People weren't paying much attention to the bangs and booms coming out of the north-or, if they were, they weren't letting on.
Apricots. Peaches. Oranges. Lemons. Avocados. Eggs. Chickens. Live baby pigs. Fish-some smoked, some salted, some you'd buy if it smelled okay. The sellers-mostly women-sat under awnings or Old Time beach umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun. Seeing what amounted to a farmers' market just south of the UCLA campus made Liz sad.
In 1967, Westwood Village had probably been the coolest part of L.A., the way Melrose was a generation later. In the home timeline, it got commercial. Then it got grimy. Then it got redeveloped and turned cool again, even if not quite so cool as the first time around. Then the cycle started over.
In this alternate, time might as well have stopped when the bombs came down. And after it stopped, it might have started running backwards. Without running water to fight them, fires flattened a lot of the shops and restaurants and apartment buildings that had stood in the Village. The buildings here now-the house where she was staying included-were built from rubble and wreckage. The market had sprung up in one of the fire-born open spaces.
“How much for those avocados?” Liz asked an old lady in a broad-brimmed straw hat-not quite a sombrero, but close.
“'Dime apiece,” she answered. “Three for a quarter.”
Liz had all she could do not to giggle. Old Time money still circulated here. So did newer coins on the same standard. Prices were ridiculously cheap, at least by the home timeline's standards. Liz had had to learn about pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters before she came here. In the home timeline, a dollar-the smallest coin around-wouldn't come close to buying what a penny bought here. And a Benjamin -a hundred dollars-was worth somewhere between a dime and a quarter.
No matter how cheap things seemed, you couldn't take the first offer. That was an insult. “I'll give you a quarter for five,” Liz said. “They aren't very big.” She'd had to practice sounding that snotty.
The old lady let out a squawk. She told Liz what a snippy, rude thing she was. All this was as formal as a dance. They settled on four avocados for twenty-five cents, the way they'd both known they would. But social rules had to be followed even when they made no sense-maybe especially when they made no sense.
More bangs and booms came from the north. “Are those getting closer?” Liz asked. That wasn't in the rules about haggling, but it was liable to be more important.
After cocking her head to one side to listen, the avocado seller said, “I sure hope not. That would be a stone bummer.”
“Yeah, wouldn't it?” Liz said. She wasn't sure, but she did think the noises from the north were louder than they had been. Maybe that was just her jumpy imagination talking. She could hope it was, anyhow.
Carrying the avocados in a cloth sack, she wandered through the market looking for a chicken to buy. Meat here didn't come neatly packaged in a refrigerated case at the store. If you wanted chicken stew, you bought a live chicken and whacked off its head with a hatchet. Then, after it stopped spewing blood and thrashing-which could take much longer than Liz would have imagined before she watched the first time-you had to pluck it and clean it. Cleaning it was a polite way to say cutting it open and taking out the guts and the lungs and whatever else you didn't want to eat.
The first time Liz helped do that, she got sick. She could handle it now, but it didn't thrill her-not even close. So she dawdled instead of buying a bird right away. Carrying one back to the house by its feet while it clucked and squawked wasn't much fun, either.
Hoofbeats drummed up the road from the west. That was more interesting than looking at one more beady-eyed chicken, so Liz turned to see what was going on. A mounted soldier galloped his horse toward the market. Liz had seen the look on his face before, back in the home timeline. People who'd just been in a traffic accident had that same air of stunned disbelief.
“What's happening, man?” somebody called.
“They beat us.” The soldier's voice was eerily calm, the way those of accident survivors often were. “They beat us,” he repeated, as if he'd forgotten he'd said the same thing a moment earlier. “They rolled us up. That stinking machine gun of theirs…” He shuddered. “They're coming. We'll try to stop them, but they're coming.”
Before anyone could ask him more questions, he rode on. He left chaos in his wake. Men groaned. Women screamed and wailed. Some of the buyers and sellers decided they didn't want to hang around anymore. Several of them looked to the north as if they expected a million Valley soldiers to follow hard on the horseman's heels.
That didn't happen, of course. Little by little, the ones who stayed realized it wouldn't. But by the time Liz bought a mean-looking chicken (so she wouldn't mind so much when the bird got it in the neck), several more Westside soldiers made it back from the fighting in the pass. Some rode horses. Others were on bicycles with the wooden tires they used here instead of rubber.
They all told the same story, near enough. They would have easily beaten the men from the Valley if not for that machine gun. With it, King Zev 's soldiers could do no wrong. “They could kill us from ranges where we couldn't even touch them,” said a man on a bike. “How are you supposed to fight a war like that?”
“Why didn't Cal know they had it?” somebody asked.
“Beats me,” the soldier answered. “He didn't, though-never in a million years.” He paused, then added one more telling detail: “Pots is dead. That gun chewed up his armor like it wasn't there. Chewed him up, too.”
People moaned and wept when they heard that. The monster mutant dog had been a symbol of Westside strength for years. What did he symbolize now? The collapse of Westside strength? It sure looked that way to Liz.
Sack of avocados in one hand, chicken legs in the other, her head full of news, she headed back toward the house. She was glad to give her mother the chicken. She wasn't so glad to pass the news along.
Mom's mouth tightened. “I was afraid of that. Remember how your father said a heavy machine gun would be big trouble?”