The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 24

  "Just one thing we can do," he said. "Get down there and find out where they went."

  A short ways up the hill, a dirt road branched off the cracked highway. Walt drew his laser and walked his bike down the switchbacking dirt, Mia and Raymond behind him. Besides the lake, there wasn't much to see: collapsed tents, a firepit, outhouses that still stunk vaguely of shit, a pile of fish bones by the shore, a long stretch of picnic tables. A simple wooden shack roughly near the center of the abandoned camp. Shaky, prophetic, all-caps graffiti blazed from its side, bright red words about angels and end times. Suspecting the shack had been the command post, Walt creaked open the door. The front room had a lightweight desk with empty drawers. The back room held a cot and a bucket. The cot was empty; the bucket wasn't. Walt scowled and went outside. He and the couple wandered the grounds, poking around under the tents, occasionally calling each other for leads that wound up false—a paperclipped set of marching orders that turned out to be from April, before the aliens had arrived, and a string of penciled numbers that turned out to be the scores from the last ten Super Bowls (Raymond, a fantasy football player, had cracked that one). If there was any sign of where the rebels had gone, Walt couldn't see it.

  The sun hovered above the peaks a couple miles away. Once it disappeared, the night would come fast. Back beside the wooden shack, Walt knelt to inspect a scrap of paper. One side was blank. The other showed a stick figure of a man with enormous balls.

  "If our time weren't worthless, I'd say we were wasting it." Walt crumpled the paper. "We don't even know if they left us a sign."

  "Well, they wouldn't leave anything the aliens could figure out," Raymond said. "What kind of sign could only a human understand?"

  Walt sat back on his heels. "Culture."

  "Culture?"

  "Simpsons quotes. Star Wars references. Cave paintings of a guy with a mustache bellowing about soup. Anything we'd get that they wouldn't." He cocked his head, reached for the crumpled sketch, and smoothed it over his thigh. "Is this a Jackie Treehorn reference? Where did Jackie Treehorn live?"

  "Who's Jackie Treehorn?"

  "The Big Lebowski. Come on, he's a known pornographer."

  "That guy. Um." Raymond pressed his fist to his forehead. "Malibu."

  "Where's Malibu?"

  "Just north of LA."

  "Could the rebels be there?"

  Raymond squinted one eye until it was nearly closed. "If they like getting incinerated by raging fires. It's like right there."

  Walt turned the sketch one way and the other, looking for letters hidden in the lines of the sketch, for numbers or coordinates embedded in the curly hairs on the figure's testicles.

  "What are you doing?" Raymond said.

  "Malibu, then. It's the only lead we've got."

  "You guys seen this graffiti?" Mia called from outside. "This is some prophetic shit."

  Walt met the other man's eyes. Together, they rushed from the shack. Walt circled the building, reading out loud the messy red paint sprawled around three of its walls: "IN THE REALM BETWEEN ANGELS AND GIANTS / SAINT STREISAND AWAITS THE COMING / OF A RED DAWN ON THE WRONG HORIZON."

  "Obviously," Walt said.

  "Giants and Angels," Raymond said. "Between San Francisco and Anaheim."

  "Well that fucking narrows it down."

  "Saint Streisand?" Mia laughed. "Who's the superfan?"

  "Saint Barbra Streisand?" Walt glanced at Raymond. "That mean anything to you?"

  Raymond tipped back his head, lips parted. "Santa Barbara. It's a city up the coast a ways."

  "So what the fuck does—"

  "Red Dawn." Mia's eyes flared with comprehension. "The Patrick Swayze movie where the locals fight off the Soviet invasion."

  They stared at each other in the fading sunlight. Walt dropped the sketch in the dirt. "Well, that was easy."

  * * *

  "Why did they fly out here at all?" Mia said. "It's so much effort."

  Raymond peeked under the bandage on his leg and frowned. "Could be for water. Look at them. They crawled out of an ocean or a river somewhere."

  "But water's everywhere. There's water on the moon."

  "Not the kind you can swim around in."

  "If they can fly all the way here, I think they can melt a few blocks of ice."

  Walt tapped out a cigarette, flicked his lighter. The cherry glowed orange in the darkness of the park. The smoke chased the scent of trees and weeds. They'd been on the road three days and he expected they'd reach Santa Barbara sometime the next day. For better or worse. For all they knew the rebels had moved on again, or been wiped out, or the graffiti on the shack had been nonsense, some war-crazed trauma victim's idea of a joke. Walt inhaled, smiling. He supposed that would be funny: scrawl some gibberish on a wall, let travelers try to make sense when there was no sense to make. Watch from the hills while they rolled out on a wild goose chase. If their search for the BRR didn't pan out, maybe he'd give that a try himself.

  Mia gave him a look. "I still can't get over that.

  "Over what?"

  "You survive the Panhandler, and what do you do? Start smoking."

  "I already smoked."

  "You'll regret not quitting next time you have to outrun a bear."

  He let smoke trickle out his nostrils. "Bears have to eat, too."

  "They don't have to eat you."

  Raymond popped a big blue antibiotic. "Not so long as you can outrun me."

  Walt flicked ash. "It doesn't matter. The aliens will get me sooner or later."

  "You don't know that," she said. "There aren't enough of them to police the whole planet. You could hide in the mountains. That's what we're doing if we can't find the resistance."

  "The thing is I'm not going to leave them alone."

  Mia considered him across the moon-bleached blackness. "Why do you think they did it?"

  "Water," Raymond said.

  Walt glanced into the patchy black woods beside the clearing. "Why do you think?"

  "Just to kill us off." She leaned forward, conspiratorial. "They wanted to take us out before we could become a threat. There's no other reason to come all this way when other resources must have been so much closer. Is there?"

  "There are a million possible reasons. I doubt they'll ever bother to explain."

  "Don't you want to know?"

  He stubbed out his cigarette. Tiny orange embers blinked away. "What would it change?"

  "Don't you sound tough."

  "Well?"

  Mia sat back, staring into the space between them where they would have lit a fire if Walt hadn't ruled it out. "It would make sense. The plague. The invasion. The extermination. It would all make sense."

  "How the hell can the end of the world—"

  Behind him, a man cleared his throat. Walt spun, the cool smoothness of the alien pistol appearing in his hand. Three silhouettes stood twenty feet away, assault rifles glinting in the thin silver moonlight.

  Walt rolled his eyes. "Haven't we all seen enough guns already?"

  III:

  LIFTOFF

  25

  "Are you the resistance?" Raymond said.

  "Get on your knees!" A bear-shouldered man rumbled forward, gun out, barely a toy in his swollen arms. A thick gray mustache carpeted his snarling lip. "I said get down!"

  Raymond lowered himself to the damp grass, bracing his knee. Mia reached for his hand. Walt stayed on his feet.

  "We look like aliens to you?"

  The hulking old man raised his elbows as if to jam the barrel of his rifle into Walt's face. "I'll have all the time in the world to read your guts you don't kneel down right now."

  A tall, thin man stepped next to the first, glasses winking over his cadaverous cheeks. "Otto, you really think they'd play dress-up just to fool you?"

  "They must first know us before they can destroy us."

  "They have bombs for that."

  The grass soaked Raymond's knees. His leg throbbed. "We're looking for the B
ear Republic Rebels."

  The third figure edged forward, nearly as thin as the tall Asian man, a bony, bright-eyed woman in her mid-30s. Her dark hair was bound behind her head. "Are you soldiers?"

  "Who isn't?" Walt said.

  Mia lowered her hands fractionally. "We found the sign. It said the resistance was here."

  "What sign?" Otto said. "Did they send you here?"

  "I can barely walk." Raymond undid the lace keeping his slit pant leg together, exposing the blood-spotted bandage. "I don't think 'they' would send a crippled guy to take you down."

  Walt shrugged. "Unless that's a cunning ploy to lower their guard."

  The tall man rolled his eyes. "Don't encourage him."

  Otto snapped away his gun. "You'd be better off if you were on their side. You won't find nothing here."

  Raymond rose, teeth gritted. The tall, gaunt man was David, the woman Anna. They led the newcomers down a path through the woods. A mile from the road, collapsed tents lay beneath the leafless branches. Cold ashes waited in the dark. Dew gleamed from a flipped Jeep. Under the scent of moisture on fallen leaves, a faint whiff of feces clung to the night.

  Walt laughed. Raymond eased himself to the ground. "What happened?"

  Anna's eyes, so wide she constantly looked like she was preparing to sit down to her first meal of the day, went rounder yet. "Well, they disappeared!"

  "We think they left," David said. "I don't see any bodies, for one."

  "Because the squids took 'em." Otto wiped his glasses on his shirt and gazed into the black woods as intently as if they'd caught fire. "They're here for meat. Our meat."

  Mia crinkled her brow. "That's a long way to go for sausage."

  Walt gazed at Raymond. "Remember that next time you're thinking of taking a solo trip to Alpha Centauri."

  "Hilarious," Mia said.

  "Shit, he could be right, though. I busted out a bunch of people they had penned up like pigs."

  Otto snorted. "A little elf like you led an alien jailbreak?"

  Raymond expected him to come back with withering bluster, but Walt just stood there. Raymond rubbed his leg. It hurt in that dull but insistent way that was somehow more aggravating for the knowledge it wouldn't fade soon.

  "Have you been here long?" he said. "Is it safe?"

  "Nowhere ever has been," Anna said.

  "A few days." David caught Otto's eyes. "What do you say? Mind if they split the camp with us?"

  Otto laughed, a phlegmy chuckle of Marlboros and old wars, and swung his chunky hand at the field of musty tents and dented, empty cans. "You sure we got space?" His gaze honed in on Walt. "No. You want to sleep, find some place that isn't next to me."

  "We're not going to hurt anybody," Mia said, puzzled.

  "At least not from this planet," Raymond said.

  Otto lifted half his mustache. "Look, you came out here to go stomping around with the rebels. You see any rebels here? Any flags? Jets? Choppers? Tomahawks? You got nothing for you to stay here."

  Raymond stood, leg shivering. "You're here."

  The old man snorted again, then shook his head. "It's a free country. But you so much as look my way while you think I'm counting sheep, I'll put one between your baby blues."

  "I'm glad we could be reasonable."

  They had their choice of tents, but Raymond had to sit and rest his leg before he'd finished hammering the second stake. He watched with jagged annoyance while Walt took over—it seemed like he'd never have another moment alone with Mia again; he estimated he'd last another two or three nights before he'd have his first wet dream in years—but as soon as the tent was up, complete with its moist-tent smell, Walt set off to find another for himself. Raymond crawled through the flap and struggled off his shoes. He was suddenly exhausted, unable to stand, barely capable of nodding when Mia asked if he was tired. She began to unroll their blankets, but he couldn't bring himself to help.

  David boiled coffee in the morning while Otto patrolled the fringes and Anna tried to coax a squirrel from a tree with a handful of peanuts. The other two were still in their tents. Raymond and Mia had quit building fires at the house once the aliens got too serious and the coffee was the first he'd tasted in weeks. He lifted his mug, a dirty white thing printed with music notes and a smutty one-liner about piano teachers, then sipped.

  "I think those things flew all this way for dark roast."

  "I had to crush the beans with a hammer." David nodded at the sock he'd used for a filter. "Don't worry, it was clean. In a relative way."

  "Who ever thought brewing coffee could be such work?"

  "It's remarkable how fast it all went away. How long would it take you to learn how to build a car? I can conceive of living in a cave rather than attempting to set a foundation. A cave!" David laughed, wryness shot through with wonder. "If we didn't have those damned crabs kicking over our sand castles, I think it could be honest fun to try to piece it back together."

  Raymond rolled coffee over his tongue. "Think we could do it?"

  "Sure. We can still read, can't we? If our visitors up and left this afternoon, I can envision running water within a year."

  "I'd kill for that."

  David leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Don't try to fight some silly war. You have a beautiful young woman. Find someplace to be with her where nothing will interfere."

  He nodded but said nothing. Part of him wanted to do just that. If Colorado was a dream, it was one that could be willed into reality. If the aliens were having that much trouble quashing the cities, how long would it take them to win over the wilderness? Did he owe it to his species to help fight? How did you measure that responsibility against the responsibility to keep those you love happy and safe? He suspected this wasn't a question for the head. Instead, it was for the heart, the guts, any of the squishy things below the brain.

  The coffee was cold when Mia woke, but he poked up the fire. Her eyelids fluttered at the roast potatoes and rosemary.

  "Let's go for a walk," she said once she finished eating.

  "My leg hurts."

  "Exactly. We'll stop when it gets to the bad kind of pain."

  He found a long, sturdy, and reasonably straight stick. The woods smelled like pine needles and a coldness that might never come. Mia matched his erosion-slow pace. Birds cheeped from the branches. After a few hundred yards, he was hot enough to ditch his flannel. After a half mile of knotty woods and open grass, the pain forced him to sit in the sun on a broad, flat boulder, where he knuckled the muscles around his throbbing wound.

  "What do you think we should do next?" he said.

  She grinned. "You ever done it in the woods?"

  When they finished—he'd stayed on his back, which felt like it had a couple new scrapes, not that he'd noticed while he was cupping her breasts and she was grinding him into his discarded clothes—he thought until he remembered his question. "About the Bear Republic Rebels. Now what?"

  Her chest rose and fell under his flannel. "I don't see any rebels to do anything about."

  "They could have relocated. Gone out on a mission."

  "And they could all be feeding alien larvae."

  "I'd like to stay," he said. "Just for a while. If they haven't come back in two weeks, we'll decide from there."

  "Okay." Her voice was dreamy. He let his eyes rest along with his leg. He never slept so well again.

  Otto rarely offered more than a handful of words, but made no further demands for them to move on, either. Walt passed the time lugging in water from a stream beyond the hill, gathering edibles with Anna, who was some kind of botanist, and keeping watch over the trailhead to camp. David brewed his coffee and combed his radio dial for anything besides static. After Raymond's fourth afternoon of limping through the woods with Mia, he returned to find Otto sitting in front of their tent, a cigar squiggling smoke from his lips.

  "You're working hard. That's good. But you're going to get hurt. That's not so good."

  He swept his forearm acro
ss the sweat on his hairline. "We'll be okay. Mia's keeping her eyes open."

  "You need to find a woman who can build a set of crutches." Otto nodded at a pair he'd leaned against the tent, stripped blond pine branches knotted together with fibrous white twine. "See if those don't help the leg."

  Raymond sat down to inspect them. The wood was smooth, the bonds tight. "Thank you."

  "If you're gonna be here, you need to be healthy. You hunt?"

  "When I was a kid."

  "Well, start reminiscing. The winter won't kill us, but three straight months of baked beans sure might."

  Otto shoved off, knees and knuckles popping, and shuffled in the direction of the trailhead. Raymond watched until he disappeared around the bend.

  That night, they all ate together for the first time, gathered around the fire as it roasted potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and red bell peppers from an overgrown garden a couple miles up the road. David cooked them on a fine mesh screen, fastidiously speckling them with pepper and flaky rose sea salt, then forked the slices out on paper plates and topped them with a chutney mashed from garden mint, cilantro, and chilies. Raymond dug in while it was hot enough to burn the roof of his mouth, leaving small strips of skin he wiggled free with his tongue.

  "I've been thinking about this for a long time now," Walt said when they'd been reduced to licking tomato juice and salt from their fingers, "and what I can't figure out is how the three of you came to form this little A-Team."

  Anna straightened her dark ponytail. "What d'you mean?"

  "Daffy scientist, dapper, epicurean survivalist, and grizzled old gun-lover. It's like you met on a reality show."

  "You think I'm daffy?"

  "Don't be offended by a snap judgment. It's true of anyone who cares about squirrels."

  "My story's same as yours." Otto's plate was crumpled on his belly. "Met these two here trying to find the army. They broke down up north. Couple of geniuses who'd never seen a fan belt before."

  David folded his paper plate in half three times, then dropped it into the fire. He used a rag to wipe down his knife and fork. "I was a history professor at Pomona with a mildly successful blog about pre-modern technology and solutions to problems we no longer have. It was a curiosity, then, or a hobby for green advocates who'd rather spend their money on iron cookware and goose farms for fletching than they would on alternative energy, but now the wind farms are powering nothing and I know how to boil leather, so there's that.