Lucifer's Hammer

Where the roads did get across low spots there was often a roadblock, farmers with guns.

And they needed a fire. The gasoline had dried out enough wood to make it burn, but it smoked horribly; twenty brothers and five sisters were all crouched in a crescent, upwind they hoped, under a billowing plastic sheet, while the smoke curled around and sometimes sought them out. Alim heard laughter and was glad.

It was bad to have women in a gang like this. Worse to have no women. Alim wondered if he’d made a mistake, but it was too late now. Shit. Alim Nassor’s mistakes could kill them all, and that, if you liked, was power.

They’d come down into the valley with eighteen brothers, no women. The people they’d met had been mostly white, mostly starving, mostly unable to fight. Alim’s band had looted for food and dry places, and killed where they had to. When they met blacks, they recruited. There were damn few blacks this far north, and most were farmers, and some didn’t want to join. That was good for Alim — fewer mouths to feed — and bad for them. Blacks would not be popular where Alim’s band had passed. And as always they moved on. They had found no place they could hold and defend. There were never enough brothers, and always behind them were farmers with guns, the remnants of police forces, survivors with nothing left to live for except killing Alim Nassor’s people…

And now there were five women and twenty men. Four men had died fighting over women. Three had been the husbands; one of the widows had killed herself that same day. Alim was grateful. It had cooled things for awhile.

But not for long. Mabe’s husband had been knifed in his sleep, and now Mabe was sleeping around, but in a strange fashion. Where she went, there were fights. Maybe she was taking revenge. But what could Alim do about it? If he killed her it would have to look like an accident. You can’t kill the only pussy the brothers were getting. Maybe at the right time? If there was another big fight and everybody knew she caused it?

Chick and Cassie were a different problem. They were farmers. Their farm was part of an ocean now, the ocean that had been the San Joaquin Valley. They talked like redneck honkies; they didn’t understand the speech of the city blood. Cassie was willowy, dignified, strong and lovely. Chick was a burly giant who could lift the back end of a car, or pick up a brother like Swan by one ankle and throw him pinwheeling a dozen feet through the air, and he’d done that.

They’d lost two kids under the water.

If the kids had been saved… Alim shook his head. Kids were the last thing this gang needed now! But in another sense… If Cassie had come on as a mother with two kids, maybe the brothers would think more about protecting her, less about getting into her.

They looked up as Alim strode into their midst, and Alim saw smiles. Yeah, the fire had been a good idea. Chick and Cassie were sitting with their arms around one another, staring broodingly into the fire. Alim squatted down before them and said, “Do we want to talk about somethin’?”

Chick shook his big head. Cassie didn’t move.

“You sure?”

Chick said, “Keep your thieves away from my woman.”

“I’m tryin’. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way things are. Anyone special?”

“Jackie. You know that son of a bitch pulled a knife on her?”

“He just showed it to me,” Cassie said, “but it scared me.” “You’re not scared of guns,” Alim said. She had a tremendous revolver, and half a dozen kinds of hand loads, from birdshot to a slug that would stop a bear. Alim had never dreamed a revolver could do so many things at once. “Why knives?”

She just shook her head, and Chick glared.

Alim stood up. “I’ll try to fix it. Where is he?”

“Hiding out.”

Alim nodded and went.

Now, should he just hang around, or try to track Jackie? Hang around. He moved among the brothers and sisters, making himself visible in the firelight. Tomorrow they’d remember.

But time wore on, and the brothers and sisters spilled into the truck in twos and threes. The drizzle was wi

To one side was the shoreline they’d been following for a week. Alim had wondered if they ought to strike off into the hills… but for what? The world the honkies built was dead, and somehow they would have to start over. A patch of farm, and a few like Chick and Cassie to show them how to work it, that was what they needed. The farmland was all there, under the water. If the water ever withdrew… But the drizzle went on and on, the fire was almost out, and the freshwater ocean was still there, too dark to see, but still there, with its floating garbage and drowned corpses of cattle and men.

And behind was a single hill, the only place from which Jackie could watch the fire. Alim went up the hill. He moved like a blind man, feeling for branches and pushing them aside, shuffling so as not to break an ankle. Presently he said, “Jackie?”

The voice was close. “Yeah, Alim.”

Alim climbed the rest of the way. Jackie was right at the peak, a man of average size in a coat three sizes too big, with his back turned. Alim said, “Why can’t you leave Cassie alone?”

“I tried.”

“You tryin’ to get me killed?”

“I tried, Alim. I even went to that Mabel She’s got nothin’ but a cunt, that woman, but I went to her, thinkin’ I could ease my mind. She turned me down. Set Swan on me. Said it was his turn. She sleeps with three a night, any prick that asks, but she pushes me off. Me!”

“She wants your head fucked up.” Alim began to see the right way to go. “She likes fights. She don’t know who stuck that knife in James, so she’s go

“What we need,” Jackie said, “is somethin’ to take the brothers’ minds off women.” He said that as if he thought it was fu

“That’d take some doin’.”

“Alim, where we going? What happens to us?”

“Hard to say.” He could talk with Jackie, but he couldn’t tell anybody that he didn’t know what they’d do, where they’d go. And Jackie was smart. Jackie had been big in the Panthers once, political like Alim. They’d worked together, Jackie to stir up the ghetto until Alim got what he wanted from City Hall, then quiet things so it looked like Alim’s doing. Get Jackie thinking, but don’t tell him, don’t tell anybody, that Alim Nassor was scared and wet and miserable and all fucked up and just about out of control…

“Black power’s finished,” Jackie was saying. “Not enough blacks, not enough power.”

“Yeah, I’d got that figured out,” Alim said.

“And there ain’t enough of us,” Jackie continued. “Not enough to hold on anywhere. Chick says it’ll take a couple of acres each to live on. A hundred acres could keep us alive, but it won’t. Not enough of us know farming. Need people to do some of the work. Two acres for each one of them, too. Takes a big spread, and we can’t hold a big spread—”

“We can’t hold a little one,” Alim said.

“Right on. So what we have to do is link up, find a honky outfit we can work with. Politics, not blood.” Jackie was staring off into the night, his voice quiet, but Alim could feel it, Jackie had been brooding about this a long time. “Damn system’s been smashed,” Jackie said. “What we always wanted, system’s gone, got rid of the pigs and City Hall and the rich bastards… and it don’t do us any good at all, ’cause there ain’t enough of us.”

“Shit. I brought out all I could,” Alim said. “You sayin’ I didn’t?”

“New, you did all you could,” Jackie said. “Not your fault it wasn’t enough. Alim, step up here and look down.”