After that was done he thought about his next move. This house might be useful. It was a good house, stone and concrete, not wood. The barn was concrete too. The land wasn’t much good — at least Amos had said it wasn’t — but somebody might make use of the buildings. “Even me,” Harry said to himself. He had to have some place to stay between rounds.
Which meant something had to be done about the bodies. Harry wasn’t up to digging two graves. He sure as hell wasn’t going to drag them out for the coyotes and buzzards. There wasn’t enough dry wood to cremate a mouse.
Finally he went out again. He found an old pickup truck. The keys were in the ignition, and it started instantly. It sounded smooth, in good tune. There was a drum of gasoline in the shed, and Harry thoughtfully filled the tank of the truck, filled two gas cans, then stacked junk against the drum to hide it.
He went back into the house and got old bedclothes to wrap the bodies, then drove the truck around to the front of the house. The chickens swarmed around his feet, demanding attention, while he wrestled the corpses onto the truck bed. Finished, Harry stooped and quickly wrung six chickens’ necks before the rest of the chickens got the idea. He tossed the birds into the truck with the Sinanians.
He went around carefully locking doors and windows, put Amos’s keys in his pockets and drove away.
He still had his route to finish. But there were things he must do first, not the least of which was burying the Sinanians.
The Stronghold: One
It is certain that free societies would have no easy time in a future dark age. The rapid return to universal penury will be accomplished by violence and cruelties of a kind now forgotten. The force of law will be scant or nil, either because of the collapse or disappearance of the machinery of state, or because of difficulties of communication and transport. It will be possible only to delegate authority to local powers who will maintain it by force alone…
Senator Arthur Jellison was in a foul mood on Hammerfall Morning. The only people he could get at JPL were PR flacks who didn’t know anything that wasn’t being reported on radio and TV. There was no way to reach Charlie Sharps. It made sense, but Senator Jellison wasn’t used to having people too busy to talk to him. Finally he settled for a phone patch into the space communications network, so he could hear what the astronauts were saying.
That didn’t help much because of the static. The live TV shots were bad, too. Was the damned thing going to hit or not?
If it did hit, there were a lot of moves Jellison should have made but hadn’t, because he couldn’t afford to look like a fool to his constituents, not even here in the valley, where he routinely got eighty percent of the vote. He’d brought his family and a couple of assistants and as much gear as he could buy without attracting a lot of attention, and that was about all he could do. Now they were all gathered in the house, most of them sitting with him in the big living room.
The phone speaker squawked. Johnny Baker’s voice, and Maureen came unnaturally alert. Jellison had known about that for a long time, but he didn’t think Maureen knew he was aware. Now Baker had his divorce, and his Hammerlab mission. Maybe, when he got down… That would be a good thing. Maureen needed somebody.
So did Charlotte, but she thought she had him. Jellison didn’t care for Jack Turner. His son-in-law was too handsome, too quick to talk about his tennis medals, and not quick at all to pay back the sizable “loans” he asked for when his investments didn’t turn out so well — as they almost never did. But Charlotte seemed happy enough with him, and the kids were being well brought up, and Maureen was getting old enough that maybe Charlotte’s would be the only grandchildren he’d ever have. Jellison rather hoped not.
“Crummy pictures,” Jack Turner said.
“Grandpa will get us good ones,” Jennifer Turner, nine, told her father. She’d found that her grandfather could get photographs and pins and things that made a big hit in her school classes, and she’d read all about comets.
“Hammerlab, this is Houston, we do not copy,” the telephone speaker said.
“Grandpa—”
“Hush, Jenny,” Maureen said. The tension in her voice quieted the room. The TV picture became a crazy pattern of blurs, then sharpened to show a myriad of rocks enveloped in vapor and fog rushing toward them out of the screen.
“Jesus, it’s coming closer”
“That’s Johnny—”
“Like it’s going to hit—”
The TV image vanished. The phone line continued to chatter. “FIREBALL OVERHEAD!” “HOUSTON, HOUSTON, THERE IS A LARGE STRIKE IN THE GULF OF MEXICO…”
“Good Lord!”
“Shut up, Jack,” Jellison said quietly.
“…REQUEST YOU SEND A HELICOPTER FOR OUR FAMILIES… THE HAMMER HAS FALLEN.”
“You shouldn’t talk to Jack that way—”
Jellison ignored Charlotte. “Al!” he shouted.
“Yes, sir,” Hardy answered from the next room. He came in quickly.
“Round up all the ranch-hands. Quick. Any that have trucks should bring them. And rifles. Get moving.”
“Right.” Hardy vanished.
The others seemed stunned. Jennifer asked, plaintively, “What happened, Grandpa?”
“Don’t know,” Jellison said. “Don’t know how bad it was. Damned phone’s dead. Maureen, see if you can get anything, anybody, at JPL on that phone. Move.”
“Right.”
Then he looked at Jack Turner. Turner wasn’t known in the valley. No one would take orders from him. And what use was he? “Jack, get one of the Scouts started. You’ll drive me into town. I want to see the Chief of Police. And the Mayor.”
Turner almost said something, but the look on Jellison’s face stopped that.
“Can’t get through to L.A. at all, Dad,” Maureen said. “The phone’s working but—”
She was interrupted by the earthquake. It wasn’t very strong, this far from California’s major faults, but it was enough to shake the house. The children looked afraid, and Charlotte gathered them to her and took them to a bedroom.
“I can get the local phone numbers,” Maureen finished.
“Good. Get the local police and tell them I’m coming to town to talk to their Chief, and the Mayor. It’s important, and tell them I’m already on the way. Let’s go, Jack. Maureen, when Al gets the ranch-hands together, you and Al talk to them. What we’ll need is every friend they’ve got, all their trucks, rifles, everything. There’s a lot to do. Send about half the troops into town to find me, and have the rest secure for rainstorms, mudslides…” He thought for a moment. “And snow, if Charlie Sharps knows what he’s talking about. Snow within a week.”
“Snow? That’s stupid,” Jack Turner protested.
“Right,” Maureen said. “Anything else, Dad?”
The City Hall doubled as library, jail and police station. The local Chief commanded two full-time patrolmen and several unpaid volunteer auxiliaries. The Mayor owned the local feedstore. Government in Silver Valley was not a large or important activity.
The rain started before Jellison arrived at City Hall. Sheet lightning played over the High Sierra to the east. Rain fell like the outpouring of a warm bathtub, filling the streets and running over the low bridges over the creeks. Mayor Gil Seitz looked worried. He seemed very glad to see Senator Jellison.
There were a dozen others in the large library room. Chief of Police Randy Hartman, a retired cop from one of the large eastern cities; three city councilmen; a couple of local store owners. Jellison recognized the bullnecked man sitting toward the rear of the group, and waved. He didn’t see his neighbor George Christopher very often.