The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 19

  Walt laughed. "I wish all we had to worry about were pigs. I've seen the truth, and if you want it, it'll cost you—" He did some quick mental arithmetic of what would get him through the next couple days. "To the tune of three bottles of water and four candy bars. Alternately, two cans of soup or ravioli, or one bag of potato chips. Family-size."

  The kid shook his bearded face. "Two bottles of water, one Butterfinger, and one fun-sized bag of barbecue Lays."

  Silly, considering the info he was about to pass on could save the kid's life, but unless Walt was about to cross into Death Valley (which he was pretty sure, but not absolutely so, was a ways into California), it should be enough to keep him going. Anyway, giving up the info wouldn't cost him anything, and he really wanted water. He stuck out his hand.

  "Deal."

  The kid lowered his pistol. "Was it the CDC, then? Like the smallpox got out? Or mutated Black Death from India?"

  Walt couldn't help smiling. "Aliens."

  "Aliens?"

  "Aliens. From outer space."

  The guy's beard ruffled, his brows knotting. "Come on, dude. I'm serious."

  "Same here."

  "Yeah." The kid waved his free hand at the sunny street past the windows. "I don't see any Martians out there."

  "Well, that's because you're kind of nowhere."

  "How do you know, then?"

  "I've seen one. It attacked me and I killed it. They look kind of squiddy and spidery. Crabby, maybe. Definitely something with a shell and little pinchy-claws and—"

  The other man shut his eyes and waved his splayed palm, as if suffering a flutter of chest pain. "Stop it. Please, just walk out of here and leave town."

  "Where's my snacks?"

  "Come on. You don't know anything."

  Walt regarded him silently. He had no way to prove it. No pilfered laser guns or floating holo-balls or stuffed severed heads. Nothing more convincing than his word. They'd had a deal and he'd told the truth. Somehow this felt more important than the fact that leaving without water could be a death sentence. They had a deal. The kid had broken their deal because why not? There was no one around to enforce it. It wasn't a covenant carved on stone tablets, the violation of which would result in a punishment of locusts and plagues. It was just a fleeting arrangement, something the kid could yank back if, in his own judgment, the rules no longer applied.

  It wasn't much. The kind of snack you would pop down to the bodega for on a stoned afternoon. A few calories of matter and ounces of fluid. The kid probably had as much in his pack right now. If he and his girlfriend had really rounded up everything in town, they had enough to last for years. Likely it would go bad before they could consume it all. Yet the kid clung to it, likely from some combination of righteous principle (Walt had "lied" to him) and the baseless, instinctual terror of want that manifested itself in greed. The toddler's pout that it's mine and you can't have it. If the snacks and water in question just disappeared, the kid wouldn't miss them in the slightest. To Walt, it was the difference between reaching the next town or in collapsing in the weeds three days from now, gum-eyed, gazing at the faraway clouds.

  "Give me what we agreed on," Walt said.

  "If you'd done what we agreed on you'd be munching on that Butterfinger right now. Instead you try to feed me some cock-and-bull story about..." The kid mashed his lips together, fluffing his beard. "Invading ETs here for our Reese's."

  "If I were a betting man, and I could trust the guy I was betting with to actually give me my stupid fucking bag of fun-size chips, I would bet they sent the disease to soften us up. You don't need to bring many tanks and shit when you can just wipe us out with galactic ebola."

  "I don't want to hear any more of this stupid crap! Just get out and—"

  Rage splashed Walt like a bucket of paint, shocking and vivid and total. He flicked up his pistol and fired into the right side of the kid's chest. The bang rang down the empty aisles. The kid spun, hands sprawling, gun skiddering away. He flopped on his face and gasped. As Walt walked up, he struggled to a seated position, left hand clamped to his upper chest, and kicked his heels at the floor, scooting away.

  "You shot me!"

  Blood pattered the white tile, coppery and hot. "And you might die. But you might not. I think that's pretty good."

  "You shot me!"

  Walt was almost annoyed enough to plug him again. "I heard you the first time, you god damn whiner. We're going to make a new deal right now. Is there food and water in your pack?"

  The kid nodded, skin blanched beneath his beard. "The water and candy, plus some—"

  "I'm going to take that and your gun. You're going to stay here and keep quiet for fifteen minutes while I leave town. Don't try to come after me. In exchange, I won't shoot you dead and go rape your girlfriend before I kill her too."

  He'd been guessing about the girlfriend; the guy had something keeping him here, and Walt hadn't seen a wedding ring. Given the dread, hatred, and terror wrestling for possession of the kid's face, Walt guessed he'd guessed right.

  "You leave her alone."

  "I will. Now give me your pack."

  The man gaped. Walt twitched the pistol. The kid winced and slipped the pack's straps from his shoulders. He held out the bag, left hand slick and red and shaking. Walt took it and backed off and crouched down to fight with the zipper. Metal-foil packaging, crinkling wrappers, ribbed clear bottles. Walt shouldered it and picked up the fallen pistol.

  The kid stared at him, eyes bright with pain. "Don't you touch her."

  "Don't worry," Walt said. "We have a deal."

  He walked out the front door, half expecting a melodic beep from the dead sensor. Sunlight struck his skin. He jogged down the main street. He was thirsty as hell, but he didn't pause for a drink or a bite of the crispy Butterfinger until he was a half mile beyond the trailers and adobe houses shimmering in the still-hot autumn sun. He didn't see anyone on the road behind him. For a moment, he imagined going to a bar to meet the kid and his girlfriend, who would be a little chunky but pretty in an alternative way, a lopsided haircut and a nose with a strangely attractive lift to its tip, and they'd laugh over beers and argue but in a friendly way about Pynchon being over- or underrated and whether Nolan was the new Kubrick. He didn't think the kid would die of the gunshot; of infection, maybe, but not blood loss or internal damage. The pair had scoured the whole town. They'd have the antibiotics to get by.

  Walt reached the next town in a little under two hours. He smiled wryly as he entered a mini-mart and loaded soups and soda and bottled water into the pack.

  He broke into a silent two-story house, checked for bodies, then napped in the upstairs bedroom. At dusk, groggy, he found a backpack and filled it with a blanket, a can opener, a couple of cooking knives, a fork and a butter knife and a spoon, packets of kitchen matches illustrated with old presidents, two flannel shirts, a metal cup, some Band-Aids and Neosporin, a small and a large pair of scissors, some balled-up gold-toe socks, a couple of too-large shirts, and an unopened bottle of scotch. With the sun sinking into the mountains, he had a few slugs from a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniels, his elbows resting on the stone-capped island in the darkening kitchen. It didn't feel the way it used to. An empty habit. He left the bottle on the island.

  Days came and went. He watched the skies, saw nothing but clouds. For all he knew the aliens had left. He crossed into Arizona. The days began to cool, the nights to freeze in the high hills; he slept in houses when he could find them. He saw some signs of others, smoke rising from chimneys, now and then a distant engine, but even fewer hints than before. Maybe the survivors were hiding. Maybe they'd simply run out of food.

  More mountains, more desert, hours passed picking through houses, adding binoculars, a Swiss army knife, a lightweight sleeping bag, Bic lighters, gel ink pens, canned and packaged food, bits of wire and string, a replacement pair of shoes (keeping his old ones in the replacement duffel), a carton of Camels which he smoked as the mood struck hi
m. There was an odd purpose in his exploring and gathering, a deeply-rooted need that left him serenely Zen-like. He entered houses looking for nothing in particular, picking through the dusty objects in drawers and closets, turning them over in his hands, contemplating their manifold uses, discarding the overspecialized and the no longer necessary, taking only the emergency and the everyday. Once, a rifle shot crackled over his head on his way through the middle of a town. He traveled overland until his water began to run down. He didn't resent the shot. A warning, no more. That was how you did things. Make your intentions clear, then follow through.

  Somewhere in the desert, but a less-desert where green things were possible and scraggly trees grew in the folds of the hills, he stopped, stone-still, and reached for his binoculars. A mile off the highway, cone-like structures rose amidst the weeds and shrubs, steep and deep blue and thirty or forty feet tall, a few higher and thicker. Spindly-limbed things sidled among the tall cones, pausing to do things Walt was too far away to see. Hemispherical ground vehicles glided over the dirt on a blur of motion that could be treads or dozens of short legs. Perhaps a hundred or more of the cones, a couple dozen of the creatures, a handful of the cars.

  It took Walt an embarrassingly long time to realize he was looking at a city.

  19

  Blue bolts licked the darkness, touching the clouds and disappearing as if they'd never been there at all. The shot woman lay facedown in the street, shins propped on the sidewalk. Raymond braked, the rubber of his tires grabbing hard at the pavement, and dropped to his feet. The air smelled like burnt hot dogs. The woman's eyes were shut. Her ribs swelled within her camouflage shirt. On her left lower back, a scorched hole exuded a wisp of smoke. The wound was dime-shaped and puzzlingly devoid of blood. On the beach eighty feet below and a couple hundred yards away, dark figures shouted and ran, lit by sporadic bursts of rattling gunfire and electric blue lasers. Armored aliens splashed along the tideline.

  "Are you awake?" Raymond said over the hollers and bangs. "Can you move?"

  She stirred, groping at the asphalt, lifting her short-haired head to blink at him. "Help me."

  He'd let his bike drop to the ground. Mia sat on hers a few yards away, staring unreadably. He propped up his bike and gestured hard. Mia pedaled forward and pulled to a stop.

  "Raymond. Aliens with lasers. We have to go."

  "Help me get her up!"

  She opened her mouth to say more, then gave one abrupt shake of her head and knelt beside the struggling woman. They hooked their hands under her armpits, guiding her to her feet. Raymond shouldered her weight. She groaned, face pinched.

  "What now?" Mia said. "Think you can cram her into your basket?"

  "Get on the seat," Raymond said to the woman clinging to his shoulders. She licked her lips and reached out with one hand, leaning clumsily for the seat. He helped her lift her leg over the bar, then, with Mia supporting the bike, knocked out its kickstand and jumped on. The woman wrapped her arms around his middle. A searing white blast rocked the beach below, followed by a huge, gut-thumping crump. As Raymond pushed off, wobbling, falling sand tickled his face and hissed on the sidewalk.

  He biked for the hill, Mia just ahead of him. It was hard work, a strain on his thighs and his balance; if he hadn't spent the last several months gardening, surfing, hiking around, and hauling wood and water from place to place, he might not have made it. A man screamed from the beach, a long wail that penetrated the staccato thunder of gunfire. A blue line flashed over their heads. Raymond didn't risk looking back. A widely-spaced row of mansions appeared along the rising cliff, buffering them from the battle on the beach. Mia kept glancing back at him, face tight. A light fog enshrouded them. The sounds of battle became hollow, spectral, echoing in the cliffs, fighting with the thump of the surf. A deep buzz mounted to a crushing bass, then dopplered away. Seconds later, a string of explosions formed a constellation across the beach. The injured woman grunted. Raymond opened his mouth to ask if she was okay, but was silenced by a rolling wave of tremendous booms.

  Things got a lot quieter after that. A few bursts of gunfire, a couple of shouts. Mostly nothing but the slow rhythm of the breakers folding over the shore. The silence was more frightening than the clamor and ruckus of the battle.

  Mia unlocked the chained gates. Raymond stopped in the driveway. The woman was awake enough to dismount, eyelids fluttering in pain.

  "Get inside," Mia whispered. "Get inside, get inside, get inside."

  "We're getting," Raymond said. He helped the woman up the steps, then reached down for one of the flashlights they kept inside beside the door. With the light on, he froze, his mind clicking in dry little circles. He had no idea what to do, where to start.

  "We should get her upstairs," Mia said, as if sensing his paralysis. "One of the spare rooms."

  "Yeah." He pulled his head back to face the woman. "Think you can climb some stairs?"

  "This is a nice house," she said in a dried-out voice.

  "That's why we stole it."

  Flashlight in his free hand, hugging her ribs with his other arm, he led her step by step to the second floor. Below, Mia rattled around in the closet where they kept their medicine. Raymond stumbled the woman into the room next to theirs and maneuvered her beside the bed. She went unconscious the moment she left his shoulder, thumping leadenly into the comforter, legs dangling off the bed's edge. Gingerly, he swung her feet up and rolled her on her back, then, after checking the curtains were drawn, went to their bedroom for candles.

  Mia popped into the room with bottles and bandages just as he finished unbuttoning the woman's camo jacket. "What are you doing?"

  Raymond gave her a look. "Not that. Give me a hand here."

  The woman's smooth belly was unmarred. They stripped off the jacket, flinging it to the side of the room, and rolled her on her stomach. The wound penetrated some two or three inches into her back, black-fringed, just wide enough that Raymond could have stuck his little finger inside, a bizarre, sudden desire he quashed as quickly as he'd had it. There was almost no blood. Just erratic drops that slid through the invisibly fine hairs on her back.

  Raymond sat back on the bed. "So, what? We just sort of clean her up?"

  Mia pursed her lips and gave a little shrug. "Then slap a bandage on her. I don't really think it will matter."

  He glugged rubbing alcohol on a fistful of cotton, breathing through his mouth to avoid its sharp smothering scent. "But she's hardly bleeding."

  "What, you've never watched a medical drama? Shock? Infection?"

  "We've got some antibiotics." He swabbed the edges of the wound, the hot red circle surrounding it. The task was both disgusting and automatic, the kind of thing that would make him shudder with revulsion if he gave it a moment's thought. Would they have been better off leaving her for a medic on the beach? Then again, everyone there had been blown up or driven off.

  "Will they be the right kind for whatever infects her?" Mia patted a wad of cloth over the woman's back and, with Raymond holding her up by her shoulders, began winding a long tan bandage around her middle. "I just don't think people with big dirty holes gouged through them have very high survival rates."

  He supposed she was right. If so, he thought the woman's death would be a failure, a nullification of whatever he'd achieved in getting her out of the combat zone. But trying to do what's right in the moment it's happening—isn't that all you can do? Mia clipped the bandage in place. He blew out the candles and went out to bring the bikes inside. Later, in bed together, the door open in case the woman called out, Mia touched his shoulder.

  "That was a crazy thing to do, do you realize that?"

  "She'd just been shot."

  "I'm not saying it was the wrong thing to do."

  "Oh."

  "But if something had happened to you—what would I have done?"

  "Grabbed a baseball bat and raced down to the beach to hit some alien-head dingers, I bet." He smiled over a small pang of annoyance. N
othing bad had actually happened. Instead, they might have saved someone's life. Now more than ever—cliched as he knew it was—that was one of the most important things in the world. Too much longer like this, and there might not be any of them left at all.

  * * *

  Her name was Sarah Campbell. She woke two days later, calling for water, sweating through her tank top. After they'd explained what happened and where she was, she told them about the attack on the beach by the Bear Republic Rebels, a resistance movement of soldiers and civilians based somewhere in the northern mountains. They'd come to Redondo to—well, she couldn't say; to find something, or to find something out, Raymond gleaned that much, but Sarah grew elusive whenever she began to approach anything like a fact about the mission. She was somewhat less vague about the BRR: a few hundred members and growing, some access to weapons and vehicles, in sporadic contact with several other cells around the world. All working towards the same rather obvious goal. So far, they hadn't had much luck.

  "They've just got the one big ship." Mia gazed down at Sarah's pale, dirt-streaked face, her close blonde hair. "Why doesn't someone just nuke them?"

  "They tried. Russia. The ship shot down the missile, then carpet-bombed St. Petersburg. Same deal in India. Not just incendiaries. Some chemical thing that poisons whatever's left of the rubble."

  "But only after we strike first?"

  "Seems so."

  Mia frowned. "So we've got the choice of sitting on our thumbs and getting wiped out day by day and month by month, or taking a swing and getting annihilated all at once."

  Sarah nodded, wincing. "Aliens seem content to kill us at their leisure so long as we don't try anything stupid. We need to start thinking sneaky instead of flashy."

  "Are the Bear Republic Rebels accepting recruits?" Raymond said.

  "Always."

  He glanced at Mia. "What do you think?"

  Sarah struggled upright. A waft of pus and burnt meat rose with her. "You don't want any part of that."

  "Those things have been going door to door," Mia said. "The only way we stay here long-term is in a mass grave."