Ill Wind (49 page)

Chapter 61

The curled paper sign said ALTAMONT RACEWAY with a black-and-white checkered racing stripe along the bottom. Someone had tacked it up at eye-level on a creosote-stained utility pole, but it had not survived the weather well.

As they tramped across the grassy hills, Iris wondered how long it had been since the speedway had actually hosted public races. The enclosed area was surrounded by loose, rusty barbed wire with occasional signs declaring, POSTED NO TRESPASSING.

Iris, Jackson Harris, and Doog stopped against the fence, looking down at the oval racetrack, the stacked bleachers
on either
side, the gray wood and peeling white paint of the announcer’s stand. Harley, the teenaged street kid from Oakland, clambered between the barbed wire; one of the prongs snagged his t-shirt, and he cursed.

The silent emptiness was disturbed only by the wind blowing across the dry grass. “This place is spooky,” Harley said.

“A racetrack isn’t much good after the petroplague,” Doog said in his slow voice.

At first Iris had thought Doog was just plain ponderous, or maybe even slow in the head, but his mannerisms came from a completely unhurried personality—not lazy, just not willing to rush. He chose his words before he spoke them, and then said exactly what he intended to say. Jackson’s wife Daphne kept insisting he was worthless, but Iris didn’t think so. Iris watched, and Doog did as much work as the rest of them. He just moved at his own speed.

Doog had a full beard streaked with premature gray, making it look like tufts of raw wool poking out from his chin. His face was saturnine, with crinkles around the eyelids; he wore full-moon spectacles like John Lennon. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his dirty shirt.

“Well, the racetrack is good for something now,” Jackson Harris said. “Let’s check it out, see how some music might sound.” He pulled the barbed-wire strands apart for Iris and Doog,
then
he swung his own legs over.

Harley sprinted ahead through the summer-dry grass over the rise to the edge of the stands. A couple of the heavy wooden bleachers had collapsed from age.

Iris pointed to them. “We’ll need to repair the seating.”

“Yeah.” Harris nodded. “But we’ll have time. It’ll take a while to get everybody here. It would have been nice to hold the concert on the Fourth of July, but’s that’s next week. Let’s be more realistic and shoot for Labor Day.”

“Good idea, man,” Doog said.

“Yeah,” Iris agreed. “That’ll give us time to bring in some musicians and try to patch together some instruments.”

Harley called from the top of the rickety bleachers. “Do you think there’s any stuff left in the refreshment stand?”

“Go ahead and look,” Harris called.

Harley delighted in smashing open the boarded-up windows. Around them, the sun pounded down on the speedway. Within view up in the hills they could see the empty lanes of the interstate highway, pointing aimlessly in the direction of LA.

Iris tried to picture what a concert would be like in this place. In the next couple of months she would throw herself entirely into the project . . . if only to keep her mind off Todd.

After walking out in anger, he still hadn’t come back after four days. She knew deep down that he had gone south with the steam train. Now, in a world with only harrowing alternatives for long-distance travel, she wondered if he might never come back.

Doog and Harris were both calling this event “the Last Great Rock ‘n Roll Concert.” Iris had tried, but there was nothing inside Todd Severyn that would make him understand how the concert was just as important to the
heart
of the people as laying electrical power lines or a heroic quest to deliver satellites that would probably never make it to space.

Todd didn’t care about her type of music. He didn’t
dislike
it, but rock
‘n
roll just didn’t affect him the way it touched her and Harris and so many others. She supposed she would feel the same if Todd had an obsession to hold the last great Country & Western concert. But there was just something depressing about music that glorified old dogs, cows, and pickup trucks . .
. .

“We can probably use the speedway’s PA system,” Harris said pointing to the metal horn speakers mounted on poles around the track. “Maybe we can get some of the closet geniuses at Livermore to rig up some amps. Then we’ll get power running out here from the windmills and pipe it through those big speakers.”

“It’s
gonna
sound like shit,” Doog said.

Harris slowly shook his head. “Man, it’s been so long since I’ve heard loud music, right now even Barry Manilow would sound good!”

Doog sat down roughly on one of the bleacher seats, which creaked beneath him. “Man, then it is the end of the world.”

Iris stifled a laugh and watched the two men.

Harris sat down next to Doog. They waited in silence for a few moments. Below them Harley rummaged around inside the refreshment stand. He didn’t seem to be finding anything, but it sounded like he was having fun.

Harris finally shook his head and set his scruffy chin in his hands. “It feels so right to be having this here. Kind of like redemption, you know. To make up for the last concert.”

They both stared at the opposite bank of bleachers as if watching crowds screaming and cheering for the band.

“Yeah. Remember? The Stones didn’t play until nightfall,” Doog said. “The show opened up at ten in the morning. Santana, I think, then it was Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Creedence Clearwater Revival.”

“No way!” Harris interrupted. “Creedence never played the Altamont! It was Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, then the Stones.”

“I thought the Dead were there.”

Harris put his head in his hands as if he could not believe the stupidity of his friend. “Jeez, you’re all mixed up! The Grateful Dead suggested to the Stones that they hire the Hell’s Angels for security. They didn’t come here themselves.”

Iris watched them, amazed. This appeared to be some sort of ritual. “Were you guys actually there?” she said, “at the Altamont concert?”

“Doog was,” Harris said.

“No I wasn’t.”

“You always talked like you were!”

Doog just shrugged.

Iris looked out at the empty stadium, trying to imagine how it must have been, listening to ghostly echoes of music and cheers and screams of pain echoing through the hills. That had been ten years before her time.

Doog said, “They paid the Hell’s Angels $500 worth of beer to work security, so the Angels went around bashing peoples’ heads in with sawed-off pool cue sticks.” Doog looked at Iris with an ironic grin. “Mick Jagger got punched by some fan as the Stones tried to make it to the stage.”

Harris said. “You should have seen how he whipped up the crowd singing ‘Satisfaction.’ They all wanted to go out and just rip people’s arms and legs off. Then when he was playing ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ some kid pulled out a gun and waved it at the stage—”

“It wasn’t ‘Sympathy for the Devil!’” Doog interrupted. “That’s an urban legend. It was ‘Under My Thumb.’”

“That’s not how I remember it,” Harris said, glaring at his friend.

“What happened to the guy with the gun?” Iris said. “Was he the one who got killed?”

“Yeah,” Harris answered. “Guy pulled out his gun, and before you know it the Hell’s Angels stabbed him and stomped him to death. Great security, huh?”

Doog shook his head. “Man, the Altamont concert was probably the darkest hour of the ‘60s. So much for all the love and peace and harmony crap the hippies kept talking about. Gave us all a bad image.”

Iris stood up from the bleachers and brushed off her backside. She felt her knees crack. “Well, then let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again at the
second
great Altamont concert.”

Harley returned from the refreshment stand. Dirt streaked his clothes, and some splinters stuck in his nappy hair. “Found some,” he said excitedly. “Two cans of Budweiser and an Orange Crush. I get one of the beers.”

“No you don’t,” said Harris, “hand them over.”

“I found them!”

“You’re still too young.”

Grudgingly, Harley handed the warm cans over.

They had sent out notices with their runners to the people in Tracy and the other towns in the Central Valley, as well as to the enclave around Livermore. They would broadcast it across the Atlantis network to anyone listening in on the short-wave radio. Word would spread, summoning the audience and the musicians for the Last Great Rock
‘n
Roll concert.

They sat in silence sipping their warm beer and passing the two cans back and forth. By Labor Day the unnatural quiet would at last be replaced by human sounds, music rising to the sky.

Chapter 62

The woman at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory narrowed her eyes at them. “You’ve
got
to be kidding.”

Todd and Casey Jones looked at each other and both shrugged. Todd removed his cowboy hat. “No, Ma’am, we’re serious. We’ve come to take those solar power satellites and haul them off to New Mexico.”

The woman gestured them inside the concrete research building, still looking at them with a mixture of amazement and disbelief. “Come and get washed up, you two. I think you’re suffering from heat stroke.”

She was a tough Asian woman, about 50, with wide hips and heavy arms. She looked like the type who’d move heavy equipment by
herself
just because she didn’t have the patience to wait for help. She pinned her gray-white hair back with elaborate pins. Her name, she said, was Henrietta Soo.

The dim facility looked like a 1960s version of a “high tech” building, an eight-story-tall cube with dark windows and light cement. The aluminum mini blinds had been taken down to allow the maximum amount of light to pour through the windows. Inside, the petroplague had dissolved most of the carpets and linoleum, leaving only concrete and plywood
base boards
.

Henrietta Soo took Todd and Casey past empty offices and a conference room where a half a dozen people stood brainstorming, scribbling things on a pad of paper propped on an easel.

In a kitchen area, Henrietta twisted on a faucet. Water trickled out with low pressure, but it was enough for them to drink and wash. Droplets sprayed from side to side in the gasketless faucet nozzle. She disappeared, leaving them to take turns at the sink, splashing their faces and pulling brown paper towels to wipe
themselves
off.

“Boy, this feels good!” Todd said as water dripped from the stubble on his chin. Casey Jones doused his
bald head
, kneading his dark skin with his fingertips.

After the train wreck, they had hiked for two days northwest of Pasadena. They passed through the sprawling, confused metropolis of Burbank and Glendale, asking directions from people on the street. They must have painted an absurd picture: both of them streaked with grime, the back of Casey’s shirt stiffened with drying blood, asking for somebody to point the way to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In Pasadena, the Rose Bowl sat empty, but a flea market had sprung up by itself, though the vendors sold a new selection of post-plague items. The lush and well-manicured country club golf course was ragged and overgrown.

By now Todd and Casey were hungry and exhausted, but they had reached their destination. The bright flowers and arching willows made JPL look like a campus, 175 acres jammed up against the sheer green-brown mountains. Once they passed into the JPL complex, they tracked down the headquarters of the satellite division. The Jet Propulsion Lab normally held over five thousand workers, but now the site was quiet and lethargic.

 
Henrietta Soo returned with a metal first-aid kit and opened it up, poking around to find cloth bandages. “Let me look at your back,” she said to Casey, and he dutifully removed his shirt. With a cotton swab, she dabbed and poked at the infected arrow wound. In her other hand she held a brown bottle. “I got a glass bottle of alcohol from one of the labs.
All of our plastic tubes of first-aid cream are . . . no longer with us.
I’ve got a few antibiotics, but we’re saving them.” She smiled apologetically,
then
said to Todd, “How about you?”

Todd flexed his hands; he was lucky they hadn’t formed any large blisters from the burn. “I’m okay.”

Casey Jones stared at the wall as she prodded crusted blood, cleaned the wound, and bandaged his shoulder. Finished, Henrietta clicked the first-aid kit shut and turned to face them.

“Now then. I’ve got some of Dr. Lockwood’s smallsats sealed up and ready for launch, but there’s no way you’ll be able to take all of them. When he asked for help getting them shipped to his railgun launching system, I never thought anyone would take the challenge. The satellites have been sitting in one of our clean rooms for months—but what I want to know is just how you two propose to get them to White Sands?”

She waited. Todd looked down at his dirty boots and shuffled his feet. Casey didn’t offer any ideas.