Todd fell asleep huddled in two blankets.
Before setting out in the early morning darkness, Todd munched dry frosted flakes from a single-serving box he had found in Alex’s pantry. The cereal tasted stale. Todd wondered how long it had been there.
This time he mounted Stimpy. They followed the ridge line, then descended to the freeway again in the stillness of the rising sun. Birds began to sing to the morning, unaffected by the crumbling of the cities.
The rest of the ride to Stanford seemed like a repeat of the previous afternoon, passing through suburbs and South Bay carbon-copy cities with different names. It seemed as if every person had decided to wander the streets, either defending their homes or looting somebody else’s. He found an isolated, tree-shaded park in Palo Alto and studied the map again, then headed toward the Stanford University campus.
In one city block, a loud crashing sound startled the horses. As he rode closer, Todd saw that crude barricades had blocked off a 12-story office building. Every few minutes, one of the glass window panes would pop free of its dissolving plastic housing and tumble to the ground, reflecting the sun like a strobelight until it exploded on the pavement. Students gathered across the street, drinking beer from bottles and applauding each new fall of glass.
Todd shook his head and rode on, close now.
When he finally tracked down Iris’s street address, he waited outside her three-story apartment building, having no idea what to do with Ren and Stimpy. He couldn’t just padlock the horses to a bike rack, and he didn’t want to leave them tied out front. He considered his options outside the complex, baffled, until he finally decided to take the horses in with him. Why the heck not?
Ren and Stimpy dug in their hooves, reluctant to go through the narrow glass door. Finally, he coaxed them into the sparsely furnished lobby, where he tied them to the wrought-iron stair railing; at least they were hidden from outside view. Standing beside a tattered sofa and an old end-table, the two horses looked at Todd as if he were crazy. He tipped his cowboy hat at them, then bounded up the stairs, his boots echoing on the hard surface.
After turning down the wrong hall, he followed the numbers, to Iris’s door. He took off his hat, then rapped on the wood. He waited. His stomach knotted. She probably wasn’t home. Iris was a smart lady, and she should have had the good sense to pack up and leave already.
Even if she was home, Todd had no idea what to say to her.
The door finally opened on its flimsy security chain, and Iris peeped outside. When she saw him, her face lit up in surprise.
“So you made it,” she said, regaining her composure. She removed the security chain and opened the door wider. “How was the ride? I’m all packed, so we can get out of here.”
Wringing the cowboy hat in his big hands, Todd said his line. “I don’t usually have to go to such lengths for a date!”
Iris raised her eyebrows, but he could see amusement behind her eyes. “Oh? Then how come you forgot to bring flowers?”
Chapter 41
A dozen saddled horses grazed on sparse vegetation outside the fence that separated the desert from the White Sands missile range. The baked ground was scabbed with alkali, but showed none of the glittering gypsum sand that made other areas look like a snowfield. To Spencer Lockwood the expedition looked more like a western cattle drive than a convoy setting out for the microwave antenna farm.
Spencer tugged on the knots securing the bedrolls, canned food, water, tool boxes, rope, wire, and first-aid kit in the old wagon hitched behind two of the horses. He looked over the ragtag collection of five scientists and three young ranch hands hunched around the back of the wagon. Several of the Alamogordo ranchers worked on the axle.
He wiped dirt from his hands and squatted next to the ranchers. He felt silly wearing a floppy cowboy hat, but even Lance Nedermyer, who had found himself stuck at White Sands with no possible transportation back to his family in Washington, D.C. had doffed his dark suit and now wore jeans and a straw hat. “Is it going to work?” Spencer asked.
“The wheel is sticking, Doc, but it’ll get you out to your site,” said one of the ranchers, applying a handful of goop to the axle. Being called “Doc” made Spencer feel like he was in an old western movie. “Never thought I’d have to use lard for axle grease!” The rancher spun the wooden wheel.
Spencer and his crew out at the antenna farm had always kept a stockpile of supplies, MREs surplused from closed-down Holloman Air Force Base, and pioneer-style accomodations. After his cross-country drive through Death Valley, he had been back home for less than three days before everything else started going apeshit around the missile base.
Thinking ahead, Spencer had gone to some of the small ranches in the lush hills, the ranchers who had bought into his power experiment as a way to get cheap rural power. Their own power had gone off days before, the first expendable victims of a decaying electrical grid. Spencer gave them a talk with more fervor than he had been able to manage for any of the Sandia scientists, acknowledging the riskiness of his venture, but vowing that he could get power up and running again with his smallsats and his microwave receiving farm. Some of the ranchers had run him off their land. But a few offered to help, donating enough supplies to keep Spencer and his crew working out at the blockhouse.
Lance Nedermyer looked exhausted. He had been even crabbier than usual from worrying about being out of touch with his wife and daughters. Back east, in the thick metropolitan areas, conditions were bound to be far worse than they were here in the rural, self-sufficient southwest.
Nedermyer scowled at the wagon train. “I still think it’s better to forget about your whole microwave site, Spencer. We’ve completed the evacuation plan at Alamogordo, and we’ll need your horses for the trip up to Cloudcroft.”
Spencer sighed. They had argued about it the night before. “You’re welcome to go with us and see for yourself, Lance. I’m betting we can switch out and replace most of those components with fiberglass or ceramic in the shops. It’s a simple system, and we can’t give up without trying our alternatives.”
The bureaucrat shook his head, hiding his personal worries behind wire-rimmed sunglasses. “Just be forewarned that if the mayor decides to head everyone up to the mountains, we’re not going to wait around for you.”
“They can go if they want.” An awkward silence fell as they both shuffled their boots in the dust.
Now that the solar power project was isolated from the rest of the world, political games were a thing of the past, and Spencer knew of no quantitative unit small enough to measure how little he cared. But he tried to remember that Lance Nedermyer had once been a talented researcher. If only Lance could remember that himself, he might provide valuable help.
A bearlike rancher in a red cotton shirt turned to the side and spat chewing tobacco. He nodded at Nedermyer. “If this plague keeps getting worse, Doc Lockwood is the only one offering electricity at all. What’ve we got to lose?”
Spencer ducked his head to hide a grin in the shadow of his floppy hat. “Even if it works it’ll only give you power for a few hours a day.”
“Better’n nothing.” The rancher still eyed Nedermyer.
Gangly Rita Fellenstein tightened her Australian bush hat and swung up on a sturdy brown-and-white horse. The mount pulled back, but Rita snapped the reins to bring it under control. The stirrups had been adjusted for her long spindly legs. She looked quite at home in her western gear. “Hey, Spence, it’s not gonna get any cooler today. Get your butt in gear.”