“Have any more good news?” In spite of the way Rob’s leg was yelling at him, he felt the needle go in and the sting of the local. He felt them several times, in fact, because Dr. Bhattacharya stuck him again and again. Then, blessedly, he stopped feeling anything south of his knee. The doctor went to work.
When he finished, he said, “Let me see if we have a set of crutches that will fit you. Your height is. .?”
“I’m six-one,” Rob answered. Using crutches through snow didn’t sound like something he much wanted to do. The alternative seemed to be staying right here till he healed, though. Crutches, then, if they had them.
Dr. Bhattacharya pulled a pair from a closet, shook his head, and put them back. “Too short,” he muttered, and tried again. The next set he found made him nod. “Yes, these will do.” He used set screws to adjust their length. “Six feet one, you said.”
“Uh-huh.”
“See how you do here, then.”
Rob tried. He’d used crutches before, but that sprained ankle was half a lifetime ago now. The knack didn’t come right back. He swung himself across the linoleum of the clinic floor. Dr. Bhattacharya gave him a vial of Vicodin and one of amoxycillin.
What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Somebody said that. Who? He couldn’t remember. If it was true, he’d just gained some serious strength points. And, if he could make it back to the Trebor Mansion Inn without breaking his other leg or his neck, he’d pick up some more.
Then the local would wear off. He wasn’t looking forward to that, even with drugs in his anorak pocket. Maybe it would make him stronger, too. Somehow, he couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for finding out.
Lindsey rushed in just before he was going to leave the clinic. “I got Marya to cover my class for me,” she panted. “Ralph said you got shot! My God!”
“Ralph said I got shot?” Rob echoed. Something in the way that was phrased made him go on “Did he say who shot me?”
“No. Who?”
“He did.”
Her face was a study-disbelief, amazement, and rage chasing one another across her features. “I’ll murder him!” she said when her mouth stopped hanging open.
“Don’t,” Rob said wearily. “It was just one of those stupid things. It wasn’t like he meant to do it-and I’m not too badly damaged, anyway.”
“For a gunshot wound, it is very minimal,” Dr. Bhattacharya agreed.
“For a gunshot wound,” Lindsey said. “Not for any other kind of wound.” The doctor didn’t tell her she was wrong.
“Would you break trail for me while I go back to the Inn?” Rob asked her. “That’d help.”
“Come to my place instead,” she said. “It’s closer, and you won’t have to climb stairs and a ladder to get to your room.”
“I’ll do that,” he said. “You bet I will. I should get shot more often.” She snorted and held the clinic door open for him.
* * *
Bryce Miller’s alarm clock went off like a bomb. It was a windup Timex of uncertain but ancient vintage. Its ticking was loud enough to be annoying when he noticed it. It kept rotten time. He’d bought it for two bucks at a Goodwill store right after he landed the job at Junipero High.
That was six months ago now. These days, one like it would cost at least ten times as much, likely more. Six months ago, power in L.A. had been pretty reliable. Now. . Now all the supervolcano sludge in the Columbia had screwed the fancy turbines up there but good. The grid had other problems, too, but that was the juicy one.
So L.A. had power a few hours a day, a few days a week. Bryce vaguely remembered reading Bucharest had been like that, back when the Communist dictator, old nutty What’s-his-name, ran Romania. The Cold War was only history to him, and seemed almost as far removed from the here and now as his pet Hellenistic poets.
The Cold War here and now was the war against real, physical cold. The world’s politics were still screwed up, but not that particular way. Los Angeles remained lucky. It might get chilly here, but chilly wasn’t arctic.
And Bryce was awake. Once that alarm started clattering, he would have had a hard time staying dead. With a rented truck, he’d spent a small fortune moving up to what they called West Hills. He was only a couple of miles from Junipero High here. These days, that was walking distance.
He had a gas stove. He could light a burner with a match when the electric flame-starter didn’t work. That let him boil water to make coffee to go with his bagel. He liked real cream in his coffee, but he used Coffeemate with sugar. Coffeemate kept basically forever. Cream didn’t keep at all without refrigeration. The apartment had a refrigerator. It made a fair icebox when he could get ice, which wasn’t often enough.
Out he went, carrying a briefcase and an umbrella. It wasn’t raining right this minute, but you couldn’t trust it even in summer after the eruption, let alone in winter. He’d work up a sweat by the time he got to school, but he didn’t worry about it. He wouldn’t be the only one.
When he got to the campus, the first thing he did was check his box. With e-mail scarce and unreliable, paper was making a comeback. A typewriter-an ancient manual, dredged up God knew where-clacked on a secretary’s desk. When you lacked what you’d had before, you did the best you could with what you could find. Or, welcome back to the turn of the twentieth century.
Bulletins and orders might be typewritten, but they got Xeroxed when the power did come on. Junipero dished out less bullshit than he’d heard public schools had to endure. All the same, the administration had some pretty good fascists in training-or would they be inquisitors here?
Bryce taught Latin, world history, and U.S. history (in the latter, he was indeed staying a chapter ahead of the kids). Maybe next year, if the world hadn’t ended by then, the powers that be honest to God would let him take a swing at Greek. Or maybe they wouldn’t. And if they didn’t, maybe he wouldn’t be so very upset. Seeing what tough sledding the students made of Latin, they might not grok Greek at all.
U.S. history first period. In he walked, to go over the causes of the Civil War one more time before the kids showed up. By Junipero standards, it was a big class: twenty-three students. No, public school wasn’t like this.
The kids were totally SoCal, which was to say, almost everything under the sun. Hispanics. Irish. A very bright Jewish kid named Perry Ginsberg, who seemed to be stoned most of the time. A dark, pretty girl named Singh, which probably meant she was a Sikh. A Vietnamese kid. A Korean.
No African-Americans, though. There weren’t many at Junipero-fewer, Bryce thought, than there were Jews. It would have been funny if it weren’t sad. Fewer black parents than Jewish ones trusted a Catholic school not to mess up their children.
He covered the points he needed to cover. “Slavery,” he said. “That’s the biggest cause. All the talk about states’ rights and other stuff, it’s just a smokescreen for slavery. The South wanted to keep it and make it grow. The North wanted to stop it and eventually roll it back.”
Most of them took notes. A few didn’t give a damn. Their parents were wasting the cash they spent here. What could you do, though?
“Question?” Bryce nodded towards a raised hand.
“Yes.” The Sikh girl nodded. “How do you know it was slavery most of all? What is the evidence?”
Would she be a lawyer when she grew up, or a biochemist? Bryce was just glad he’d done his review before the class started. He had the answer at his fingertips. “Well, let’s look at South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession. South Carolina was the first state out of the Union, remember. When the ordinance talks about why the state’s leaving, it says ‘These States’-the free ones-‘have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions, and have denied the right of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and eloin’-that means steal-‘the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books, and pictures, to servile insurrection.’ It goes on for several more paragraphs after that.