Another silence followed that. Danforth looked over at a man I recognized—Ben, his assistant.
“We’d better get going,” Danforth said after this silent conference. “We’ll go on foot.”
Steve said, “It’ll take a couple hours to walk to Dana Point.”
Danforth nodded. “Is the freeway the best route?”
“Up to the middle of San Clemente it is. After that there’s a coastal road that’s faster, and less exposed to scavengers.” Now that he was sure we were going, Steve’s voice was filled with excitement.
“We don’t have to worry about scavengers tonight,” Danforth said. “They wouldn’t attack a party this size.”
We climbed back up the shoulder into the hot dry blast of the wind. Like me, Mando carried a gun in his hand; Steve and Gab had room in their coat pockets for theirs. When we were all on the roadway the San Diegans started north, and we followed. A few men disappeared ahead and behind us. They had all sorts of guns with them: rifles, pistols as long as my forearm, little fat guns on tripods.
Trees swayed on each side of the road, and branches tumbled through the air like injured night birds. The stars winked brightly in the cloudless black sky, and by their light I could see a great deaclass="underline" shapes in the forest, the whitish slash of the freeway stretching ahead through the trees, the occasional scout jogging back down the road to us, to report to the Mayor. The four of us kept right behind Danforth, and listened silently as he discussed things and gave orders in a voice calculated to warn every scavenger in Orange County. Walking down the middle of the road, we topped the rise where brick walls tumbled into the freeway, climbed over them and were in San Clemente itself.
“I expect the wind will slow them coming in,” Danforth remarked to Ben, unaware of the boundary we had crossed, the boundary I had promised Tom I would never cross. “I wonder how much they had to pay those patrols to let them through? What do you think the going price is for a trip to the mainland, eh? Do you think they tell them it could cost their lives?” Nicolin kept right on the Mayor’s heels, soaking in every word. I fell farther and farther back, but I could still hear him when the three men in the rearguard climbed out of the brick tangle and one said, “Either stay up there with them or get off the road with us.” I picked up my pace and rejoined the Mayor’s group.
Up and down, up and down, over the hills. Trees bounded in place under the wind’s hard hand, and the wires still in the air swung like jumpropes. Eventually we came to the road Nicolin had mentioned, that would lead us through San Clemente to Capistrano Beach and Dana Point. Once off the freeway and down in the rubble-filled streets I was obsessed by thoughts of ambush. Branches flew out from between broken walls, planks slapped each other, tumbleweed ran at us or away from us, and time after time I clicked over the safety of my pistol, ready to dive for cover and shoot. The Mayor highstepped over the junk in the middle of the street easy as you please. “That’s our point man,” he shouted to us, aiming with his pistol at a silhouette dodging through the street ahead. “There’s tails a block behind us, too.” He gave us the whole strategy of our positions in the street, which seemed like accidents of the moment. The men all had their rifles at the ready, and they were spread out well. “No wreckrats are going to give us trouble tonight, I don’t believe.” He kicked a brick in the road and stumbled. “Damn this road!” It was the third time he had nearly fallen. In all the rubbish it was necessary to watch every step, but he was above that sort of thing. “Doesn’t the freeway go right to Dana Point?” he asked Steve. “The maps showed that it did.”
“It turns inland about a mile from the harbor,” Steve said, his voice raised to carry over the clatter the wind was making.
He still sounded weak compared to the Mayor, who was talking in his everyday voice.
“That’s good enough,” Danforth declared. “I don’t like the footing in this junk.” He called to the forward scouts in a voice that made me wince. “Back to the freeway,” he told them. “We need to hurry more than we need to hide.” We turned up a street headed inland, and intersected the freeway after climbing over a fallen building. Once on the freeway we marched at good speed north, all the way through San Clemente to the big marsh that separates San Clemente from Dana Point.
From the south side of the marsh we could see Dana Point clearly. It was a curve of bluffs, not tall like the cliffs down in San Diego, but tall for our part of the coast, and the curve stuck out from the generally straight line of the land. Now it was a dark mass against the stars, not a light on it anywhere. Underneath the sheer part of the bluff was a tangle of marsh and island, trees and ruins, bounded by a rock jetty that protected a narrow strip of water. Once or twice when fishing to the north we had taken refuge there in storms. The jetty was invisible from where we stood, but Steve described it in as much detail as he could to the Mayor.
“So they’ll probably land there,” the Mayor concluded.
“Yes sir.”
“What about this marsh here? It looks like a good-sized river. Is there a place where we can cross?”
“The beach road has held,” Steve said. “It’s a high bridge over the rivermouth, so it drains right and none of it’s ever been washed out.” He said this as proudly as if he were the bridge builder. “I’ve been across it.”
“Excellent, excellent. Let’s get over it, then.”
The road leading from the freeway to the bridge was gone, however, and we were forced to descend a ravine, cross the creek at its bottom, and climb the other side. My pistol was getting to be quite an irritation in all this climbing, and I could see Mando felt the same. Danforth’s exhortations kept us hurrying. Once on the beach road we hurried over the thick sand that covered it, to the mouth of the estuary. As Steve had said, the bridge was still there, in good shape. In a low voice Gabby asked me, “How does he know all this?” but all I could do was shrug and shake my head. Nicolin had made night treks on his own, I knew that—and now I knew that he had come all the way up here, on his own, and had never told me of it.
Out on the bridge we caught the full brunt of the wind for the first time since we had entered San Clemente. It peeled over the bridge with a force that made us stagger, and it shoved the water of the river in choppy waves against the pilings. The waves burst into foam and rebounded into the channel, to be carried out to sea gurgling and sucking and hissing. We didn’t tarry there, and were quickly over the bridge and under the bluffs of Dana Point, out of the wind’s full power.
Tucked under the bluffs was the marshy flat that had once been the harbor. Only the channel directly behind the rock jetty was free of the sand and scrub that had drifted in and covered the rest of the little bay. We struggled through nettles and man-high brush to the beach facing the jetty, less than a stone’s throw away from it. Swells broke over submerged sections of the line of rocks, giving it a white edging and making it visible in the starlight. Weak remnants of the swell washed up the pebbly beach. The jetty ended almost directly across from us; we stood at the entrance of what remained of the harbor.
“If they land here they’ll have to get through this marsh,” Jennings said to the Mayor.
“You think they’ll sail in there, then?” the Mayor said, pointing up the channel to where it ended against the curve of the bluff.
“Maybe, but when the swell is small like it is tonight, I don’t see why they wouldn’t avoid all this and sail over to the beach back there.” Jennings pointed back the way we had come, at the wide beach stretching from the harbor south to the bridge.
“But what if we go there and they land here?” said Ben.