The Fifth Sacred Thing (50 page)

“What kind of raid?”

“Pharmacy. The boys down in Hollywood thought if you went with them, you could help them identify some of the drugs.”

“Is it dangerous?” Madrone couldn’t help but ask.

“Everything’s dangerous. But they’ll take good care of you. Littlejohn and Begood’ll be your guides.”

They hiked along the ridge, the mountains folding away below them in the darkness, stars glittering overhead. A belt of lights gleamed below them, jewels studding the night on the sloping edges of the hills. Beyond, in the flat basin, factories glowed eerily. Here and there a steady flame from a chimney pot illumined a cloud of smoke.

They crouched in the shadow of a clump of bushes and looked down on the freeway, which stretched like a concrete river cleaving the hills below them.

“You’ve got a good head for heights, I hope,” Littlejohn said.

“Good enough,” Madrone said, swallowing nervously. The motion only irritated her already dry throat. Actually, she hated heights. The summer they had done their rock-climbing course, when she was fourteen, had been one of near torture for her. But, she reflected, it had taught her what it was intended to teach—that she could face a fear and move on through.

Below them on the roadbed, lights raced back and forth: cars, supply trucks, troops moving to and from the military camps that filled what Begood called Saint Ferd’s Valley. Madrone stared at the lights, almost hypnotized. She hadn’t seen so many motor vehicles moving at once since her early childhood. It was a strange sight, like a time warp. Gas-powered cars. The smell of the chemicals the cars released in their passing burned the inside of her nose.
They moved so smoothly and confidently, as if nothing were wrong, as if tankers still plied the oceans filled with oil from faraway lands and planes still spanned the continents and the Central Valley were still rich, populated farmland, not uninhabitable desert.

“Where do they get the gas and metal and rubber for the tires?” she asked.

“They still drill a bit, offshore, down by Long Beach. They brew some gasohol. And they cannibalize. There’s huge factories down in the flats where they take apart old cars and make new ones for the military and the rich. You got to be rich to afford the driving permit. Don’t you use cars in the North?”

“Very little. We have a few electric vehicles, mostly for emergencies—fire pumps and ambulances. We can’t support a private motor vehicle for every person. We can’t spare the land to drive and park on, let alone the resources to build and maintain them.”

“What do you do, then?”

“We use bicycles and horses, some, and trains to move heavy goods. A few electrotrucks, that go where there aren’t any rail lines. And we have good public transport networks all around the Bay.” She could have happily gone on for hours, describing the Transport Collective and the gondolas in intricate detail, but she could not avoid the ascent ahead forever. “Is that what we have to cross?”

To their right, a concrete overpass spanned the road. It was partially supported by a skeleton of steel, protection against earthquakes, that provided a crisscrossing grid of interlocking beams.

“That’s it,” Littlejohn said.

“It’s the jungle gym from hell,” Madrone said brightly.

“The beams are the best way to go,” Begood said. “If you can do it. Otherwise we have to shoot the guard.”

The guard paced back and forth on the roadway above them. Yes, it would be unfortunate to shoot him just to save herself the trip across the beams, but it was tempting.

“The lower support beam’s your best bet,” Littlejohn said. “It’s broad enough—about a foot wide. The only problem’s getting on and off it. Or if you freeze up in the middle.”

“If you think you might panic in the middle,” Begood said, “it’d be better to just shoot the guard and get it over with, than to have to peel you off and end up shooting all sorts of guards later, not to mention risking getting our asses fried. Remember the time Oldjohn froze up midway? Shit, we practically had to carry him out to the middle supports, and then he couldn’t get back on the beam and dawn was coming. We ended up stuck out there all day, hiding out behind the overhang until it got dark again. Hijohn had to hike back, steal
some rope, shoot the guard after all, and then we had to haul Oldjohn up the side, in broad daylight. There we were, out on the middle of the bridge, with no cover, and a whole platoon of Stewardship troops bearing down on us—”

“I can do it,” Madrone said, “if we just go ahead and don’t think about it. Can we go now?”

Quietly, they crept down the side of the hill to the base of the overpass. Littlejohn climbed the struts that led to the main beam, pulling himself gracefully up from one to the next. Madrone followed, wishing her arms were stronger. Begood came behind, occasionally giving her a welcome push.

The concrete surface of the overpass stretched above them, curving in two gentle arches supported in the center by thick piers anchored in the middle divider of the freeway. A scaffolding of steel framing followed the contours. Littlejohn swung himself onto the central support beam and stood up. Confidently, he walked out, balanced a hundred feet above the roadway.

“Just one thing,” Begood said cheerfully. “If you fall, try not to scream.”

“Sure,” Madrone said, taking a deep breath that choked her with the fumes from below. Don’t think about it, just do it, she told herself, and stepped out.

If she thought of the beam as a line on the ground, she could walk it easily, fearlessly. If there were nowhere to fall, she couldn’t fear falling and wouldn’t fall. And if her heart would just stop that silly pounding, and her stomach stop that twisting sensation …

Every twenty feet or so, a steel pier stretched vertically up from the beam to connect with the support struts that ran beneath the concrete. Littlejohn grabbed them with both hands and swung his body around them. When she reached the first one, she did the same. Not bad, she thought, although her hands were sweaty and slippery and the moment when she had to release her weight from one foot before she could solidly place the other was terrible. She remembered, suddenly, one of those afternoons on the rocks. She was halfway up a cliff, and she stuck fast, couldn’t move up or down. Nita had been her partner, and she was getting excited, yelling down instructions and exhortations. Then Bird had come by and had suggested, very calmly, that she open her eyes and look at where she wanted to go and think how to get there. She did. Remembering that, she was around the second pier. She thought of Bird sitting down at the piano, his hands so clumsy at the keys, and the song he had made for her came back to her as she wiggled onto the concrete supports of the central piers.

“Halfway,” Littlejohn said. “You want to rest?”

“No, let’s get it over with,” Madrone said. The second half, with Bird’s song ringing inside her, was a little easier. But by the time they reached the opposite side, her shirt was soaked through with sweat, and as they touched the ground she noticed her knees were trembling. Begood landed beside her.

“Good girl,” Littlejohn said.

“Let’s go,” Madrone said.

The hills on the east side of the freeway were far more populated than those on the west. They made their way along a roadway lined by enormous estates. From time to time, cars approached, and the three flung themselves into bushes or hid behind trees until the headlights swept past them. All Madrone’s senses were alert. She could smell unseen roses that clambered up walls, she could scent dogs far enough away to skirt the edges of their territory and prevent them from barking.

They walked for what seemed like hours. Madrone was thirsty, but she popped a raw acorn into her mouth and let its astringent bite distract her. The moon sailed over them, a thin, waning crescent. She was tired, so tired she felt she was walking in her sleep. No more cars passed; it was almost dawn.

They were still high on the ridge as the light from the soon-to-rise sun made a pink smear on the basin’s eastern rim. High bushes of feathery chamise gave them some cover, and Madrone could look through their concealing spires and see the panorama spread out below.

The vast flat plain of the basin was dust dry. A haze hovered over the jumbled forms of cracked buildings and crumbling structures. No discernible lines of roads or streets and no spots of green relieved the patchwork of gray and brown. Only here and there, towering black stumps of dead palm trees marched in uneven lines, the ragged sentinels of ancient avenues.

A narrow band of green hugged the base of the hills and sent tendrils up into some of the eastern canyons. Compared to the drab of the plain, the green looked almost obscene, too bright, somehow, almost artificial. She could see, on the nearer slopes, rich houses surrounded by terraced and landscaped gardens. Far to the east, the towers of downtown rose in vertical spires of metal and glass.

“Hurry,” Littlejohn said, motioning them down a side road that soon dead-ended at a wire fence. Beyond, a dirt road led into a canyon. They climbed the fence and scrambled down the road, reaching the cover of brush around the dry streambed just as the sun rose full in the sky.

The word “camp,” Madrone thought, was a gross exaggeration for what they found, which consisted of two men and one woman huddled in the hollow under a bush.

“Drink deep,” they murmured, a greeting which more and more sounded to Madrone like pure sarcasm. Littlejohn uncorked a water bottle and passed it around for a carefully measured swallow.

“Go easy,” he warned Madrone. “You guys have any water?”

“A cup or two’s all we got left,” said the man closer to Madrone. He was short and slight, hardly more than a boy, but his brown, leathery skin made
him look ancient. “They call me Big John,” he said, winking. “This here’s Joan Dark and Johnny Come Lately.”

Lately was dry and dark as a bean that’s lain too long in the sun, but he had a wide friendly grin and green eyes that looked speculatively into Madrone’s. Joan Dark was silent, and Madrone smelled sickness on her, and pain.

“You the healer?” Lately asked.

“Yes, I’m Madrone.”

“Can you look at Joan? She took a bullet graze a couple of nights ago, and now it’s infected.”

Joan was thin to the point of emaciation, and her half-moon eyes were shrouded, wary. Madrone unwrapped a bandage of rough, dirty cloth from the woman’s stringy thigh. The stench assaulted her. The wound was shallow, but the flesh around it was inflamed and an ominous red streak went up her thigh into her groin.

“Can we spare any water for washing?”

The others exchanged glances.

“We don’t have much,” Littlejohn said.

“She can have mine,” Lately said.

“We’ll all share a bit,” Littlejohn said. “But go easy on it.”

Madrone nodded, pulled out one of the clean rags she had stashed in her pack, and wet it gingerly. Carefully, she swabbed out what she could of the dirt that clogged the wound. What did they want from her? Wave a magic wand and make everything better, when there was nothing, nothing to work with, not even the most basic necessities? Oh, she was angry, not at these men, not even at the lawn-enveloped mansions that clung to the hill above them, but at the sheer greed and waste of it all.

“I’ll be all right by tonight,” Joan murmured.

“No, you won’t,” Madrone said. “You have a very serious infection, and you need to lie still and quiet and rest.”

“Can’t you heal it?”

Madrone sighed. “I can give you some energy and relieve some pain. But without being able to wash it properly—even if I could magically kill off this batch of microbes, the dirt in the wound would reinfect it.”

“What can we do?” Lately whispered.

“Look for anti-infectins when we raid the pharmacy. Isn’t there anywhere we can take her where she could be cared for?”

“There’s Katy’s place, down in the city,” Littlejohn said.

“How far is that?”

“Ten, fifteen miles.”

“That’s too far.”

Littlejohn shrugged. Madrone bit her lips again. It wasn’t their fault that
all these warm and comfortable houses perched so blithely on the ridge were closed to them.