The Wanderer

Just to the left of the Monica Mountainway outlet and car-crush, a clutch of black and white police cars was drawn up on a cleared stretch of shoulder, in a semicircle reminiscent of a wagon-train camp. This “laager” guarded a car-wide break in the fence, looking as if it had been done with heavy wire-clippers. A half-dozen police were inside it, and right now one of them took off on a motorcycle through the break, immediately turning and gunning along north on the flat outside the fence. A few people came out of their bivouacs and seemed to hail him, but he kept on, and they stood there as his dust-wake broadened and billowed around them.

To the right, where the big black cloudbank was growing rapidly higher, there were fewer bivouacs but more people in the open — slim people moving around fast, mostly, waving and leaping, gathering in clumps, dispersing, regath-ering. And it seemed to be from this direction that there, was coming, quite tinny and faint, the squawk and squeal and drumbeat of jazz.

Between the two groups of people behaving so differently, there was a hundred-yard stretch, including the Mountainway outlet, that had no people at all in it, even sitting in the cars — except for ten or so stretched here and there on the ground. Hunter wondered for a moment why they chose to rest in the baking sun, before it occurred to him they were dead.

He was fringe-aware of his comrades from the school bus and the truck gathered around the Corvette, too. Now he beard more footsteps coming and the Little Man saying, “Look at that cloudbank. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of a wet southeast wind like this in Southern Cal,” and McHeath replying, “Maybe the ocean’s broke through and filled the Salton Sea and other low spots, Mr. Dodd. And with — gee! — maybe a hundred miles of tidewater, there’d be lots of evaporation.” Hunter continued to scan the overpowering scene ahead.

Three of the slim, active ones came into the no-man’s land along the shoulder, moving in a cavorting, dancing run. One of them, by his gestures, might be carrying and swigging from a bottle. They’d come sixty yards when there was a crackle of gunfire from the police-car camp. One of the three fell — hard to tell at this distance whether he lay quiet or writhed. The other two vaulted over the nearest line of stalled cars and hid.

Hunter put his arm around Margo tight. “My God, Doc, what goes on?” he demanded.

“Yeah, for crissakes, Doc, tell us what you can see through the glasses,” Wojtowicz put in. “It looks like war.”

“It is,” Doc reported crisply. “Now listen to what I say, everybody that wants to,” he went on loudly, continuing to scan through the glasses, “because I’m not going to tell it twice and there’ll be no time for anybody else to sight-see with these. It’s a war, or a big skirmish, anyhow, between a lot of young people and the older people — or I should say the police helped by a few older people, but most of the rest of those neutral or at any rate useless. Big kids versus police protecting families. It’s the Day of the Children.

“Those slim ones are teenagers, mostly. They’re drinking — I can see a liquor truck bust open and kids handing out bottles. They got a live jazz band going in a cleared space. There are fights — knife and fist. A gang with sledges is smashing car windows and beating in car bodies for no sane reason.”

Doc censored from his account the acts of stark love-making he noted inside the cars — for shade rather than privacy, it seemed — the two girls dancing naked near the jazz band, the wanton beatings-up and terrorizings, and — in the other direction — the group draining a car radiator and eagerly drinking the…well, he hoped there weren’t too many additives in the water.

“But not all their violence is against cars or each other,” be went on. “There’s a bunch of them sneaking up right now between the empty cars towards the police camp. A few of them have guns, the rest bottles.

“I think the police have set up a little ambush on their side. At any rate I can see two or three of them crouched behind cars in the middle of the jam.

“But before the battle starts, we’re going to be out of here, heading back for Mulholland,” he went on in a louder voice, handing the glasses to Rama Joan and turning to face his crowd. “Doddsy! McHeath! Have Pop and Hixon turn their cars — there’s room to do it — and…”

“You mean you’re asking us to turn tail and run?” Hixon himself demanded loudly from where he was standing, rifle in hand, just beyond the Ramrod. “When there’s decent folks down there about to be swamped? When we could turn the tables easy with that gravity gun? Look, I been a cop myself. We got to help them.”

“No!” Doc rasped back at him. “We’ve got to protect ourselves and get the momentum pistol to some responsible science group — and while it’s still got power in it. How much charge is there left in the thing, Margo?”

“About one-third,” she told him, checking the violet line.