The wind had been coming out of the west, off the ocean. It swung around after the sun went down, and started blowing from the mountains to the sea. If flying embers spread the fires toward bomb-ravaged Santa Monica… well, so what? Dan watched them burn that way with, if anything, a certain sense of relief. Anybody trying to sneak through the dead zone would be sorry.

Eleven

Once upon a time, in both this alternate and the home timeline, the section of Los Angeles called Venice had really had canals. They were long gone there, and they were long gone here, too. The Mendozas ” wagon rolled north through Venice toward the wasteland that was Santa Monica.

Liz tried not to think about the gunfire to the north-to the northeast, now. Not thinking about it wasn't easy, because it got louder and closer every minute. She wasn't calm, or anything close to calm. To keep from driving her parents crazy, she had to pretend she was.

After a while, she wondered if they were pretending, too, so they wouldn't drive her squirrely. If they were, they made better actors than she did.

The farther north she and her folks went, the stranger the looks people gave them. “'You fixing to go into the dead zone?” a cobbler called, looking up from the boot he was resoling.

“What if we are?” Dad said.

“Well, plenty of folks go in there,” the local answered. “Not so many come out again. You look like nice people. Wouldn't want to see anything bad happen to you.”

A ferret-faced fellow corning out of the tavern next door leered at the Chevy wagon. “'Wouldn't want to see anything bad happen to you while we ain't around to grab the leftovers,” he said.

“Oh, shut up. Stu,” the cobbler said, and then, to the Mendozas, “Don't pay him no mind. He's got as much in the way of brains as my cat, only I don't have a cat.”

“Er-right.” Dad said. “Any which way, I expect we can take care of ourselves.” He displayed a modern copy, made in the home timeline, of an Old Time Tommy gun.

“Well!” said the cobbler, who didn't seem to know quite what it was. “'Pretty fancy piece you got there, buddy.” He turned. “Ain't it. Stu?… Stu? Where the devil did he go?”

He'd turned green and ducked back into the tavern. Liz watched him do it. He knew exactly what Dad was showing off, and how many bullets it could spray. He clearly wasn't a predator-he had no taste for a fight. Hewas a scavenger. If somebody else did the Mendozas in. he'd scrounge what he could from the things the real robbers didn't want.

“Are you sure that was a good idea?” Mom asked as the wagon rolled on. “One of those guns is worth a mint here. We may have people coming after us on account of it.”

“Anybody who tries will be sorry,” Dad said. “We don't just have one Tommy gun-we've got three.”

Liz was anything but thrilled about shooting people. But she wasn't thrilled about people shooting her, either. She supposed she could pull the trigger if she had to. If she did end up killing somebody, she'd probably heave her guts out right afterwards.

When she said so, Dad replied, “As long as it is afterwards. In the meantime, do what you've got to do. You can be sorry about it later.”

“You don't talk like a history professor,” Mom said.

“I hope not,” he told her. “I know enough history to know thinking like a history prof from the home timeline while we're here is liable to get us killed. I don't want that to happen. It's too permanent.”

Houses and shops with people in them got thinner and thinner on the ground. Piles of rubble and obviously empty buildings grew more and more common. But just because a building was obviously empty, that didn't mean it really and truly was empty. Maybe-probably-bandits lurked in some of the sorry structures that looked about ready to collapse under their own weight.

Dad handed Mom and Liz their submachine guns. That put a lot of firepower on display. Were the bandits on vacation? Or did they figure they didn't want to tackle a wagon defended by three Tommy guns? Liz had no way to know. She did know she was glad things stayed quiet.

And then they got into the dead zone. Where the bomb hit, there mostly wasn't enough of anything left to make rebuilding worthwhile. Everything looked charred and melted, even after 130 years. The scrubby weeds pushing up through (-racks in the glassy crust didn't do much to hide that. Nothing could. It was like looking at a dead body in a threadbare suit.

Liz thought about Santa Monica in the home timeline. She thought about the beach and the malls. She thought about all the people, especially on weekends. And she thought about the RAND Corporation. The Russians had likely used a bomb here to make sure they knocked it out.

Well, they did. Along with the United States, they knocked almost everything out. Liz started to cry.

“What's the matter?” Mom asked.

“It's all ruined.” Liz sniffed. “No matter what we do, we can't fix it. It'd be like unscrambling an egg.”

“I wish I could say you were wrong, sweetheart,” Dad told her. “But you're not. All we can do is help a little and try to find out what went wrong.”

“It's not enough!”

He nodded. “I know. It's what we can do, though. And it's more than most of the bombed-out alternates ever see. Easier and cheaper just to leave them alone. We don't have the people or the resources to do anything else.'“

“We don't want to bother.” Liz made it into an accusation. “We don't care.”

Dad only nodded again. “Mostly we don't,” he agreed. “We're spread too thin the way things are. Anil Crosstime Traffic needs to show a profit, not a loss. And so…”

“So we make like a bunch of vultures and watch things die,” Liz said.

“We do pass on antibiotics when we can.” Did Dad sound defensive'.'' If he didn't, why not? “And we showed them how to make the anthrax vaccine. More of their cows and sheep live, so more of them live, too.”

“Oh, boy.”

Liz 's sarcasm was largely wasted, because the gunfire from the Santa Monica Freeway line changed note. Dad paid more attention to that than he did to his own daughter. His head came up like a wolf's when it took a scent. “The Valley soldiers are using that heavy machine gun again,” he said.

“Heaven help anybody coming at them, then,” Mom said.

“Yeah.” Dad nodded one more time. “Only thing I worry about now is whether Cal 's boys will try an end-around through the dead zone. If they do, we've got problems.”

But they didn't, not while the light held. Liz wondered why not. Scavengers and scroungers did come in here sometimes. Most people in this alternate stayed away from places where H-bombs had fallen, though. They had to know the fallout wasn't poisonous any more, or the scavengers wouldn't go in. Still, lingering fear or superstition kept almost everybody away.

The sun went down. The stars started coming out. Dad stopped the horses and gave them their feed bags. They chomped happily on oats and hay. The Mendozas, not so happily, ate bread and smoked pork and sauerkraut and raisins. They drank rough red wine that would have got any vintner in the home timeline fired. It was safer than the local water, which was guaranteed to give you the runs.

“Isn't this fun?'' Dad said as they got ready to sleep in the cramped wagon. “Isn't this cozy?”

“Fun?” Liz said. “As a matter of fact, no.”

“Too blasted cozy, if anybody wants to know what I think,” Mom added.

“Everybody's a critic,” Dad said. Liz gave him a dirty look. He could fall asleep in thirty seconds and keep sleeping through anything this side of the crack of doom. Trouble was, he thought everybody else could do the same thing. Most normal human beings couldn't, and he didn't get it.

“Warmer tomorrow,” Mom said. “Breeze isn't off the ocean anymore.”