Midmorning of the next day, when he was briefed on the situation, Peter Shaunsen, Acting President of the United States, asked three questions: Was anyone interested in being on the rebuilding commission? Could some of the fire lanes be cleared and paved into boulevards or malls to beautify the city? And what was being done to ensure that everyone who was not dead was able to vote?
A Secret Service man who was at the meeting skipped his next shift to walk over to see Chris Manckiewicz at the Washington Advertiser-Gazette. He expected to be fired when he returned, but no one even asked about his absence, so he just picked up his gear and went to his post.
SIXTEEN HOURS LATER. OFF THE CALIFORNIA COAST. ABOUT TWENTY MILES WEST OF THE MOUTH OF THE RUSSIAN RIVER. 2:30 P.M. PST. SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 2.
Ysabel was “not what you could call a natural sailor,” Bambi said, not for the first time, to Mensche. The Pacific is choppy in the fall, but nonetheless, most people got some kind of sea legs after a day on the sea.
Bambi had adjusted to the constant retching noises from the girl hanging over the railing. As they had worked their way north, the waves got a little bigger, heralding a storm forming far up toward Alaska, but the prisoner seemed no worse, or at least she had no more to expel.
“At least she’s not a flight risk right now,” Larry Mensche pointed out. He had turned out to be a natural sailor; she’d taught him to hold a course by the compass, allowing her to get long naps all along the way, so that she was in much better shape than she had expected to be.
“I can see why people like this,” he observed. “But I’m guessing this is perfect weather, right?”
“About as perfect as it gets in the fall, yeah.”
A strange urking noise from the rail made Mensche scuttle forward and slap Ysabel’s back a couple of times, clearing something that hadn’t quite come out right, then wipe her face with a damp cloth, surprisingly gently. When he returned, Bambi said, “Considering how much of a pain in the ass to the whole world she’s been, you’re pretty nice to her.”
“She looks a lot like Debbie,” Mensche said. “So… even if it doesn’t make any sense—”
“Naw, it makes all the sense in the world.” Bambi squeezed his arm, and he nodded, appreciating the support. One more point for the man, he can tell the difference between the pretty chick being his buddy and copping a feel. “Hey, chances are that if your daughter needs the help, someone’s taking care of her. Remember that’s half the stories on KP-1—people looking after each other, communities banding together to make it through, all that. She’s probably swinging a shovel on a road crew and getting one big bowl of soup a day, but she’s got somewhere warm to sleep and she’s safe, bet you anything.” It sounded lame to Bambi even as she spoke it; she had to think, If the guards just locked them down and walked away, how long before—
“Yeah,” Mensche said, “but I can’t help worrying. Anyway, so how’d this guy end up with a name like ‘Quattro,’ and how’d your dad decide he was the man for you?”
She shrugged. “Our parents knew each other, very well, actually. When I was a lonely teenage girl, and he was a miserably lonely geek of an engineering student, we corresponded all the time, inventing codes to keep the old man baffled. It was years before I realized how much I’d encouraged the old bastard, since he thought Quattro and me must be hiding our love affair. Quattro was my lifeline; I needed someone to agree with me when I said that all the kids in my high school were stupid and worthless and superficial, especially because I was pretty and popular and a brat and a half, so I didn’t have the loser support network that so many alienated kids do. Dad’s plan for me to fall in love with the dashing older man and unite two Castles and two Castle-movement families, however, foundered on the fact that I’d sooner have married one of my pet llamas at the time.
“Quattro’s not attractive? Nice guy but no spark?”
“Nowadays he’s a damn handsome Howard Hughes type, he’s only seven years older than I am, and I occasionally think about seeing whether any sparks might happen. But back then, give me a break, he was old, not to mention a weird geek, despite being my best friend ever—which wasn’t hard back in those days, all you had to do was like having me for a friend. Hardly anyone else did.
“Anyway, so about his name. Quattro’s parents were chronic jokers. They noticed that a lot of dumbasses didn’t know that Mercedes was a girl’s name and that the car was named after a major investor’s daughter. That particular ignorance led, later on, to people naming their kids P-o-r-s-c-h-e instead of P-o-r-t-i-a, and even lamer baby names like Lexus and Avante, because the same dumbasses thought it was all classy and shit to name their daughter after an expensive car.
“So apparently the Larsens, being even more eccentric than my father, and maybe slightly richer, decided to sarcastically name their children after cars, figuring that all the friends they wanted to keep would get the irony. Hence Quattro. He says it was a compromise between Prius and Thunderbird.
“Anyway, Quattro was raised as one of those heroin-in-vending-machines libertarians, and they gave him his own Castle for his twenty-first birthday. I guess a Ferrari would have been too humdrum. So now he has a fortress outside Jenner that’s damned near as elaborate as Dad’s. You’ll like him, he’s pretty much post-political, good heart, nice guy… hunh. I might have to check the spark thing.”
“I really appreciate your taking me along—I know you didn’t have much choice, but I guess I’m glad it’s me. I don’t think the Federal government will last much longer.”
“Dad would agree with you.”
“Yeah, but he’s working on it, I’m just assessing. Anyway, if they dismiss me… well. Just a few hundred miles to walk to Coffee Creek and see what happened to Deb, or if I can’t find out there, maybe I can walk over to Reno and see if my ex knows anything. Something to do, you know?”
As they sailed on, clouds gathered to the north, and the sea rose a little every hour. Late that afternoon, the sea breeze started to blow inland. She headed the boat in toward the coast. “How exactly will you find where we’re going?” Mensche asked. “Without GPS I mean? I’m assuming that weird telescope and the windup clock have something to do with it.”
“I don’t really need to know longitude, because we’ve been sticking close to the coast. Latitude is a piece of cake with an accurate clock—like the chronometer from Dad’s collection, here—and this little gadget that you call the weird telescope is used to measure the angle between the sun and the horizon, or where the horizon would be if the water would hold still—that’s what the level on the side here is for. So I’m sailing along a line about five seconds of latitude south of the mouth of the Russian River. That should bring me in someplace along the state beach; once I spot land, I just sail north till I see the mouth of the Russian, and in we go—Quattro’s Castle is just west of Jenner, on the river, so it’ll be the first Castle on our left.”
“It’s weird how fast people got used to ‘Castles’ in America.”