Relapse (Breakers Book 7) Page 17

  "To bring them your head on a platter."

  Anson strode through the weeds. A bird burst from the bush. He jumped back, then laughed at himself. "Correct. To prove that she's the only one capable of taking me down."

  "And the second reason?"

  "Personal. Emotional. She blames me for her current predicament. I'm the one who drove her from San Pedro. If that had never happened, she'd never have been pushed from power. By defeating me, she will restore that power."

  "Could be."

  "Could be? Geoff, this is the elementary psychology of leadership. She's where she is because her whole identity insists she deserves it. Being dethroned challenges that identity. She'll stop at nothing to reclaim her confidence in who she is."

  Lowell detoured around a rock. "You're sure we're still talking about Raina?"

  Anson rolled his eyes. "Can we please take my security a little more seriously?"

  "With Raina gone, and their council in a holding pattern, the guerrilla attacks are over. We'll take the Sworn who've been defending our assets and reassign them to your defense, both to you personally and on patrolling for incursions."

  "And what will you be up to?"

  "I can only be in one place at once. Do you want me on Raina? Or probing the Council?"

  Anson tugged on his upper lip. "The Council isn't time-sensitive. Making them wait to hear our position will only make them more scared and open to manipulation. The girl, though? She'll come straight for me."

  "Do we have a long-term strategy for the Council?"

  "Raina or no Raina, our goal is the same: total control of everyone in the area. I'd rather not suffer another bloodbath on Catalina. Much easier to absorb the Council."

  "From what I saw, I'd say that's feasible."

  Anson stopped beside a tree to tear off a three-foot branch as thin as his pinky. He stripped the leaves and tossed them aside. "Did you get a read on them? Are they going to be pliable?"

  "I'd heard there were five of them, but I only saw four. The most eager to throw himself into the net was a guy named Nolan. Went out of his way to put me on Raina's trail. He'll bend like copper wire."

  "That's what I like to hear."

  "The leaders appear to be Tina Young and Wilson Gates. Young's an egghead. You want to control her, all you have to do is threaten to make her look stupid. I get the idea she'd love to be first among equals, but she's afraid of Gates. Could work that angle, too."

  Anson flipped a bunch of leaves to the ground. "What's his deal?"

  "Sheriff of Catalina. Bet you he was a lawman before, too. Maybe military."

  "Uh oh. Sounds like trouble."

  "He's more pragmatic than hardass. You can get him to move where he needs moving, but you'll have to use a light touch. If he gets the idea you're herding him, he'll start kicking." Lowell glanced across the dirt and leaves, but the only tracks were their own. "The last is a guy named Raul. Skeptic. Might vote against the others just to hear his own dissent. But that's isolated him. He doesn't have any sway."

  "So we turn Young and Nolan, do our best to keep Gates coaxed, and see about planting one of our own as the fifth. They'll need a tiebreaker, won't they?" Anson cocked his elbow and lashed his switch into the branches of the tree he'd taken it from, sending leaves spinning. "I like it. I like it a lot, Geoff."

  "Enough to put Raina on the back burner?"

  "Don't you think that would expose me to unnecessary risk?"

  "Move now, and you can tip the entire island. That will lower the risk not only to you, but to your people. There's the Kingdom of Better San Diego to think about, too. Did we kill Dashing? No—but they might blame us for putting him up to it. Nobody likes a two-front war. But if we wrap up Catalina, San Diego's nothing we can't handle."

  The blond man frowned, then continued to lash the tree. "None of that matters if that little girl tears out my still-beating heart. I want her gone. I can't move forward until I see her body in front of me."

  "Is this about vengeance?"

  "It's about symbols. Raina is still the core of the Catalinans. As long as she's out there, they have hope." He tucked the switch under his arm. "Take care of her. While you're on that, I'll send someone to keep stringing along the council."

  "By your command."

  If Anson registered the sarcasm, he didn't let on.

  * * *

  The Santa Monica Pier was starting to look like something out of a low-budget '80s movie about life after an extinction-level asteroid. Peeling paint. Fuzzy, spray-worn wood. Signs with half the letters missing. Bird shit spackling the Ferris wheel. Only two parts of it looked like they hadn't been abandoned years ago: the dock where they berthed the fishing boat, and the building the People slept and lived in, a Bubba Gump Shrimp that—for reasons known only to God and themselves—they had kept in perfect upkeep, including repainting the sign of the smiling shrimp in a top hat begging to be eaten.

  He asked for Soo; when presented with Anson's dream, she was one of those who'd swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. If Lowell asked her to cut off one of her arms, her only question would be which one.

  "You seen any boats out there in the last three, four days?" he said. "Anything you didn't recognize?"

  She gazed out to the shimmering sea. "No. No, I don't think so. Would you like me to ask the others?"

  "Would you?"

  She smiled and padded into the Bubba Gump. Seagulls pecked at the fish guts drying on the dock. Soo returned, holding out her empty palms, smiling and shaking her head.

  "Sorry," she said. "But they said they'd keep their eyes open. What's this about?"

  "Raina," Lowell said. "We think she might be back on the mainland. Would be her and a small party of soldiers."

  "Raina? You think she's here?" A gull flapped from the restaurant's gutter and Soo glanced over her shoulder. "Wait. A couple days ago, I heard they found a body down in Venice. It was chewed down to the bone. Do you think that could have been her?"

  He suppressed a sigh. "I'll check it out. Thanks for your time."

  He mounted up and rode south. At Venice, he met with a man named Lewis who took him out to where they'd found the body. This was a vacant lot thick with dry, yellow weeds. Dried blood and paw prints marred the dirt.

  "We figured it was dogs," Lewis said. "Is this something we should be worried about?"

  "It was just dogs," Lowell said. "Listen, you heard anything about Raina lately?"

  "Raina?" Lewis' jaw swung forward. "Hang on, she was raised by wolves, wasn't she? Do you think she did this?"

  Lowell took a long time producing a stick of gum and chewing it. He balled up the wrapper and put it in his pocket. He wasn't sure why he did that instead of tossing it to the ground; it wasn't like they were collecting trash these days. Old habits.

  "No," he said at last. "I do not think Raina and a pack of wolves killed and ate a man in this field."

  "Then why are you asking about her?"

  "As it turns out, we're in the middle of a war with her."

  "Well, I haven't heard anything." Lewis toed a patch of blood-darkened dirt, then rubbed his shoe in the weeds. "But I'll be sure to let you know if I do."

  The remainder of Lowell's trip down the coast turned up a nest of rumors so contradictory and outlandish he gave some thought to compiling them and dropping the whole mess on Anson's desk to prove the futility of the search. As the sun neared the bay, he met with a team of the Sworn and assigned them to follow up on the few promising leads.

  It was the tail end of sunset before he made it to the lighthouse on the southern cliffs of Palos Verdes. He was met by Counsell, the sixty-year-old former math teacher who, after the People's taking of the region, had deemed it his calling to keep watch from the heights of the tower. Counsell helped Lowell see to his horse, then brought him in to share sandwiches and day-old coffee.

  They settled into chairs at the top where they had a full view of the blackening sea. It was good to be sheltered from the weather and
to have coffee, even when it was lukewarm. Counsell didn't say much, and when he did it tended to be gruff, cryptic, or both, but Lowell liked him. He knew the difference between what was important and what wasn't. Not so much in a philosophical sense, but in the sense that, when he looked at a thing, he knew what parts of that thing to watch. It sounded simple, but it was a vanishingly rare skill.

  They talked for a while about the state of things. Lowell had been riding all day, and his skin felt hot and sun-beat, but he had the jitters.

  "Funny," Lowell said, holding up his hand to show how it shook. "In the days of plenty, I used to drink a pot of coffee before noon just to stay steady. Now look at me."

  Counsell's pale blue eyes held on the trembling fingers. "Maybe there's just more to worry about these days."

  He snorted. "You seen any ships coming in over the last three, four days?"

  "The bay's quiet. They know to stay on their island and we know to stick to our shores." The old man lit a twist of tobacco and exhaled it through his nose into his white whiskers. The smell was incredibly stale. "I did hear something yesterday. Your boys in Long Beach found a boat. Said it looked old. But if you could trust them to do your job, then they'd have your job."

  "I don't know if you mean for that to be comforting, but it is."

  They watched the moon on the waves for a while, then went to sleep. Lowell woke before dawn, but Counsell was already up, seated on the tower's outer platform, pointed toward the sea.

  Lowell stepped outside. "What are you hoping to see out there?"

  "An honest man."

  "Expecting to be here a while?"

  "The rest of my life."

  Lowell ate, saw to the horse, and headed down the road. The hills coated him in shadows and a cold wind blew in from the ocean. He stopped at the Dunemarket to pick up the gossip, then moved on to Long Beach to meet with the Sworn patrolling the eastern border. A soldier named Matt escorted him miles down the road to where they'd seen the boat.

  It was still there, parked on the sand, shielded from the road by a grove of trees. Interesting that they'd pulled it ashore. They didn't intend to make a return trip any time soon, then.

  "This is where you found it?" he said.

  "Yep." Matt shielded his eyes from the glare. "I told Duke and he came down for a look, but we thought it had been here for ages. It's all beat up. Filthy, too."

  "Looks that way. You did fine. Go on home."

  Matt hesitated, then adjusted the collar of his white cape and hopped on his horse. Hooves faded up the road.

  Lowell climbed the boat's side. The fiberglass was dirty as hell, mottled with dust. That didn't mean a thing, though. It was fall on the coast. Every night, dew settled from the mist and dried by late morning, leaving a patina of crud behind. You could wash your car on Wednesday, and if you left it outside, by Friday it would look like it had been there for months.

  He moved inside the cabin. The wheel and dash panels were largely clean. The floor, too. They hadn't left anything else behind, but that was enough.

  The sandy beach had been rearranged by the waves and the wind. It took him two hours of concentric circling to pick up the tracks in the leaf-strewn grounds of the grove of trees. These headed east. Away from Los Angeles. They soon merged with the highway, where it would have been beyond simple for the travelers to reverse course without a trace toward Long Beach. But if so, that's what the Sworn were for.

  He rode east. He wasn't too hopeful of finding more. He was at least three days behind them, and the blacktop, river-like, kept a tight lid on who'd been across it. He rode slowly, dismounting to take a closer look at gouged gravel, flattened brush, and stray trash. Late that afternoon, he picked up tracks heading north into some mild hills. There, he found a camp site. No fire, but the grass was crushed down and the dirt was turned up where they'd buried their rinds and chicken bones.

  The trail ambled further from the highway. Sometimes he lost it, and had to continue by instinct, checking out sources of food or water or easy travel. Midway through the second day, he began to suspect he was wasting his time, yet—perhaps as a perverse form of protest—he stuck with it.

  In any event, when he paused below a ridge for a look at the next hill, it was nothing but luck when he heard a man's laughter ring out below.

  Lowell backtracked with his horse, tied it up, then made his way forward until he had a look at the camp. Five people sat around in the shade, gabbing and laughing. He recognized two of them: Mauser, Raina's right-hand man, and Mia, the girl who'd infiltrated the Heart dressed as a man. There was no sign of Raina.

  Hours later, with the afternoon light going long and yellow, she still hadn't shown. With her compatriots stirring to forage, Lowell backed off through the trees, doing a casual sweep for any sign of the girl. As the land pinched into a draw, he spotted a series of nickel-sized holes punched in the soil. Testing one with his finger, he found it was two knuckles deep.

  His blood cooled. He followed the holes through the draw into a narrow valley. A wind blew in from the north, shaking the trees. Lowell stopped to take in the scene. As soon as he quit moving, an alien scuttled toward him from the undergrowth, two thick tentacles raised above its oblong head.

  14

  By cover of night, they came in to shore, driving the boat straight into the sand to make it appear as though it had been there forever. As Raina splashed onto the beach, a coldness touched her spine. In the moment, she couldn't recognize it, but days later, she would understand what the feeling had been: that she was being hunted.

  The coldness passed. She was with friends. She was with friends, and she was off the little island and back on the sprawling continent. The air tasted like a cold spring. In silence, she led the others through the trees and onto the highway.

  "What's the plan?" Mauser's voice was as soft as people in church. "Suicide mission to take Anson's head?"

  "I don't think that is the way," Raina said.

  "Then what's your big idea?"

  "I don't think I have one."

  He glanced at the others. "Mark the date in your diaries. For the first time in recorded history, Raina doesn't know what she's doing."

  "Maybe that's okay," Mia said.

  "Is it? Not to be the bearer of bad news, but we've just exiled ourselves to enemy lands. It would be nice to have some idea how we're going to, you know. Not be hunted down like dogs."

  Mia moved to the middle of the highway. "We're miles from their border. If we stay out of trouble, then we'll stay out of trouble."

  Raina nodded. "We go east."

  "What, just like that?" Mauser said.

  "It's as Mia said. We'll remove ourselves from threat until it's time to become a threat."

  She walked down the road. Normally, she didn't like to walk down open streets when there were good trees to pass beneath, but she wanted to make a statement to the land she had returned to: she was not afraid.

  They'd spent all day at sea before swinging north at nightfall and she soon grew tired. The six of them ventured into a neighborhood three blocks from the highway and cleared one of the houses. Though there were bedrooms, everyone bedded down in the living room. Perhaps they were scared, but Raina thought it was more that they wanted to feel like a family, or a pack united against the darkness.

  When she got up, she found this feeling had persisted through the night: Henna sat in the front window, bow in hand. Mia and Bryson were out back gathering oranges and lemons from the yard. Carl was sorting through the boxes in the kitchen, looking for anything that hadn't been claimed by insects and mold. Only Mauser snored on.

  Soon, they went on their way, continuing east along the coastal road. Raina kept her eyes open for signs as to where she should go next, what she would do, but the world held its tongue.

  "I have thought all day," she announced that night. They had wandered from the road in the afternoon and made camp in a fold between two low hills. Crickets sang to them from all sides. "And I still don't
know where we're headed."

  "Do you need to?" Carl said.

  "I don't like to move when I don't know where I mean to end up."

  "I know you don't. It doesn't mean you're right."

  "All things have purpose," Raina said. "When you know that purpose, then you always know where to go."

  Bryson kept his gaze on the dark woods. "Okay, so what is our purpose? Shouldn't it be to kill that asshole Anson? Or those five other assholes who voted you off the island?"

  "Who cares about any of them?" Carl said. "Who wants to fight about any of this nonsense? Let's go to Phoenix. Or Oaxaca. Or the Yukon. Anywhere makes more sense than in the middle of a war we no longer have a stake in."

  "I would say that sentiment calls for a drink," Mauser said, "except we have nothing to drink, and now I'm sad."

  Henna edged her knife across her whetstone. "If the world won't show you the way, then you must look within."

  "I've looked within myself," Raina said. "But it's like when the tide is retreating. Just when you think the foam and sand are about to clear, a new wave washes against the outgoing one, and the waters are dirtied again."

  The night went silent except for the insects. They were too far from the coast to hear the boom of the waves. A vast shadow seemed to drop from the trees and swoop across the camp.

  "Holy shit," Mauser said. "Tell me that was an owl."

  "What else would it be?" Mia said.

  "A flying horror? Some untold spawn of the aliens?"

  "The aliens can't fly."

  "Oh yeah? What about Tremors 3, when the Tremors worms climbed out of the ground and started zooming around?"

  "It was an owl." Mia jerked around to stare at Raina.

  "You know what we must do," Raina said.

  "Yep. You have to go on a vision quest."

  "A vision quest?"

  "It's something some Native American children did to travel into adulthood and find their purpose."

  "But I am not Native American," Raina said. "Or a child."

  Mia laughed. "You're way too literal. This isn't a recipe or a magic spell, where you have to follow every step precisely or it's ruined. You don't even have to think of it as a vision quest. Just a chance to be by yourself. To learn yourself. For months, your every waking moment has been devoted to fighting Anson, or getting your people to safety, or wrangling the council. It's no wonder you lost track of what you want."