The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 25

  "My Sasha and I both proved immune to the Panhandler. We had a cabin in the mountains where we lived while the violence boiled off into steam and the stovetop patina of the dead. We spent some time discussing the ideal place to relocate—right where we were, where we had the advantage of familiarity? Canada, for the isolation? Central America, to avoid winters and achieve a yearlong harvest? An island in the Gulf seemed attractive, too, but neither of us knew much about nautical matters.

  "Ultimately, we decided to travel to Eastern Washington. It's relatively isolated, it's a desert clime with mild winters, and despite the summer heat, which frankly sounds barbaric, you can make good work farming due to volcanic soil and the Columbia River, which, we predicted, would also once more become a potent source of salmon. So. The truck was loaded. Routes were mapped. Food canned and tubbed. Gas siphoned.

  "I-5 is an interesting route, if you've never taken it. The interior of northern California is positively Mediterranean, if lacking a gorgeous blue sea or the centuries of cultural tradition. But the olives are just as green.

  "We were attacked outside Redding. Mountain town, very pretty. Sasha died on the highway. We were holding hands and she fell into the weeds. The shot entered the back of her head and one look at the remainder told me enough. I ran into the woods. I lived there like a native until it got too cold. I supposed I'd come south for the weather, but really I was hoping to run into my attackers. Motorcycle people. They wore orange. I saw no sign of them. I detoured to Monterey to see whether the aquarium still had any minders—she'd been a marine biologist, Sasha, relished our trips there. She loved to roll her eyes at the guides."

  In the silence, a log crackled, startling Raymond. David stared at his hands. Anna gave him a gentle smile.

  "I was working for a Monsanto team up north," she said. "Altering seeds. It was reeling, dizzy stuff. We made DNA sing and dance and sprout horns. If I still had that team, these aliens would be toast. Chomped up by fifty-foot carnivorous corn cobs. I'm not kidding. Well, kind of. I wasn't surprised by the virus or the invasion. I think I'd been assuming the agricultural conglomerates would take care of the apocalypse within the next decade themselves.

  "I don't know why I headed south? Mexico, I think. Oaxaca. Pictures of the cliffs. And then Chichen Itza. I thought if I saw those ruins I could understand our own. I took Highway 1 because what's the hurry? The ocean's nice." She nudged David's hunched shoulder. "I bumped into this guy staring at a bunch of dead fish."

  Mia dug a seed from her teeth. "What about you, Otto?"

  "Already told it."

  "Come on, there's no TV out here. I'm dying."

  "Kids didn't take to the sickness," he said simply. "Figured I'd go to Alaska. Always wanted to live there before I had my girls. But when I found these two outside Monterey without a rifle, sidearm, or spitball gun between them, well, it seemed like murder to leave."

  Raymond couldn't tell if there was an edge of annoyance to David's smile. Anna's seemed wholly pleased. "So you three?" she said. "Let's don't stop story hour here."

  "Well, we inherited a house in Redondo Beach," Mia said.

  "And were about to lose it," Raymond smiled. "Or be forced to move out of, anyway."

  "Then, you know, the world ended."

  "And after our house burned down, we realized all those much nicer houses on the hill didn't have owners anymore. So we moved into one. We had a garden, a system for water. It was really nice."

  "Then we looked outside and there was a mothership hovering over the bay." Mia laughed, sobering up as she checked off the alien sweeps and their measures to clear out the city, the botched raid by the Bear Republic Rebels, how they'd taken Sarah into the house. "She shot Raymond as we were trying to flee. We bumped into Walt in the street on our way out of town. That was just, what, two weeks ago?"

  The faces around the fire turned toward Walt. "I walked there from New York." He tossed his paper plate into the flames. "It took a while."

  "You walked?" Otto said. "From New York City? Has the East Coast not heard about cars?"

  "It made sense at the time."

  The fire coughed sparks. At the time, Raymond thought, it always makes sense. Even here and now, camped out with strangers waiting for an army that might not exist, forced into the wilderness by aliens and plague, it made sense, in its own particular way; he knew the chain of events that had brought him here, could see the shape of several routes from here. But should they have moved into the house on the hill? Should they have gone to Alaska? Mexico? Eastern Washington?—well, no, he'd driven through the place enough to know that. But the point stood. It would be cliched to think that, no matter how narrow the rapids ahead looked, he had a million options at any point in time, but the truth was he did have a million options. Some better than others, no doubt, but he couldn't know which for sure until he gave them a shot, and if he found himself in the midst of a bad current, he could switch course at any time. A million boats could clog any river. All he had to do was jump to a different deck.

  In a literal sense, though, he had a bullet-shaped hole through his leg that was still on the mend. So he hobbled through the woods on his crutches, Mia handing him bottled water when they stopped. Walt, ever restless, announced he was heading back south for a few days to seek out sign of the BRR. The others lodged no complaint.

  Even as Raymond was living those days—smelling the pines, feeling the grit of the trail under his feet, the sharp yet sweet pain in his thigh when his weight landed too strongly—he knew they'd be ones he looked back on with no second guesses about what other boats he could have taken instead. They were simple and clear and good. They reminded him of the first days Mia had moved in with him in Seattle to his dingy apartment shared with two male friends and a small German Shepherd, none of whom ever raised a finger to clean. It was dirty and they had no AC in the summer and Raymond supplemented his job cataloguing books at a bookstore with food stamps, but his friends were right there and Mia liked them and he knew the neighborhood. The two of them had to stretch $180 to cover a month's groceries, and he knew if they were still living that way in their 30s, something would have gone terribly, dreadfully wrong, but at the time, it was a perfect balance of work, sleep, sex, vodka, video games, art, weed, sobriety, and movies, with just enough nights out at the bars, restaurants, and parks to keep from getting cabin fever.

  The culmination of this period, which had lasted two years until he and Mia moved into their own apartment minus roommates and dogs of any kind, had come on a Fourth of July weekend when his roommate Matt talked them into driving to the lake and barbecuing in the heat beside the dazzling cool water, where they ate beer-marinated bratwurst and passed around fifths of Dr. McGillicuddy's Fireball Whiskey while playing a strange game involving golf ball bolas and PVC pipe wickets. In the morning he and Mia had dismissed their hangovers with a puff of smoke (but not too much to drive) and he'd taken her down to a motel on the Oregon Coast, which she'd somehow never seen, and it was rainy and windy and cold, but they poked at sand dollars and crabs on the shore and ate seafood caught that day and then went back to the seaside motel where they'd screwed so hard he was surprised the headboard hadn't pounded down the walls and bucked them right into the neighbor's room.

  That was it, one weekend, a stereotypical summer holiday with his friends and one more day spent on vacation proper, but the memory was so clear to him he could have narrated every detail on command—how the sun had disappeared in mist as they crested a ridge past Portland; the scallops at dinner at a restaurant where the carpet was so worn it was shiny; the dirty word they'd found carved into a colossal and wave-worn trunk washed up on the sand; the color of the mugs—white outside, teal inside—at the coastal-hipster coffee-and-sandwich place they'd walked to before driving back north. Two days that felt endless because each moment was so rich it could have fed a full day of its own. He and Mia had had that time together in the house on the hill before the aliens arrived, and now, walking and screwing and c
hatting in the quiet, cool woods outside Santa Barbara, they'd found it again. That was what life was about. Building times so good they felt like forever.

  A week later, Walt came back from LA with two more alien lasers, a pack full of bows and arrows, and an idea. He plunked down by the fire. Otto, upset that Walt hadn't properly identified himself before he drew down on him at the trailhead, was mollified when Walt handed him one of the short-barreled foreign pistols for examination.

  "Don't suppose you found this piece in a Hollywood pawn shop."

  Walt shook his head. "I lifted it from its former owner, who made no objections to me taking it after being very thoroughly shot."

  "Just how thorough?"

  "Skull like a bowl of gazpacho."

  "I take it that's a soup."

  "You take right." He leaned in toward the heat, face yellowed by the firelight. "I found a way to fight back."

  Otto nodded, the stubble on his neck rolling. "Nuke 'em. I know where three silos are in-state."

  "We can't nuke them," Mia said.

  "Says who? Now's not the time to be worrying about a few flipper-babies."

  Raymond frowned. "They've tried. We heard about it on the radio. Everywhere they've launched a nuke, the aliens knocked it down and leveled the place."

  "Did Americans try?"

  "Not that I know."

  "There's your problem."

  "It's not nukes," Walt said. "It's the opposite. I don't know how many of those things there are—five thousand, ten—but I know how many there aren't."

  David ran a thumb along the wrinkles below his jaw. "Guerrilla warfare. The tactic of occupied lands throughout history."

  "They can't fly in reinforcements overnight. If we can kill them one by one, until they don't have the men to crew their ships, we can beat them."

  "This plan," Anna said, "sounds like it could be rephrased as 'choke their rivers with our dead.'"

  Walt laughed. "I'm not asking anyone to come with me. You don't have to decide right now. What I'm telling you is I'm going to go back to Los Angeles to kill as many of those genociders as sneakily and evilly as I can."

  Otto stood, as if ready to ride off on a stallion then and there. "They killed my daughters. I been waiting for some army, but if I haven't seen it now, I doubt I ever will."

  Raymond glanced at Mia, who was already searching for his eyes. "I don't know about us. We'd need to talk."

  "I'll go," David said. "All the knowledge in the world is no use if you're disintegrated before you can teach it to the children."

  "Um," Anna said.

  Walt hugged his knees to his chest, his face still and distant as the full moon. "Take your time. I'd like to radio around. Spread the idea. See whether anyone else is already trying it and what they've found out. Should take me a couple weeks before I'm ready. Do whatever you think's right."

  Raymond shifted, thigh jangling with a sudden shot of pain. A new boat floated down that river.

  26

  Smoke tumbled from the chimney of the false hacienda, rising in a pillowy white language even aliens could understand: humans live here. Down the block, Walt shied his left arm away from the thorns of the brush he was hidden beneath and listened to the keen of the coming ship. Could be in for a bombing. That would be some bad luck. Have to scrap the whole campaign, at the very least resolve for a longer slog than his most patient projection. If they couldn't count on luring the squids out to play, whittling them down could take years. Years Walt may well wouldn't see; his spot was just thirty yards from the hacienda's front door, and if the bombs came largely or sloppily enough, his last moments would consist of the transition from being Walt into becoming a foul-smelling mist of vaporized guts, carbonized bone, and superheated shit.

  Well, he'd find out soon enough.

  Something hefty and ceramic crashed from the second floor of the house where Walt crouched in the shrubs. He scowled. While Walt was out roving and broadcasting, Mia had trained with the others at camp, ranging from competent to natural at everything she tried, be it firing pistols or bows, building and lighting fires quickly, or hiding in just the right place to have full coverage of a park trail while remaining nearly invisible. But first time in the field and she was smashing vases like an epileptic steer. He turned over the idea of walking out on the group and continuing on his own. Then again, no need to decide while he was still waiting for the bombs.

  The engine-noise swelled until it was ready to jiggle the windows from their frames and his teeth from his jaw. Through the thick screen of branches, the scalloped black oblong of a flier descended vertically, disappearing behind the clay tile rooftops a couple blocks away. Dust plumed above the houses, dispersing in the faint wind. At once, the keening snapped off, leaving Walt's ears ringing with the tiny wail of a muted TV.

  Three aliens rounded the corner, carrying weapons in claws and tentacles, dressed in their perverse pink straps that reminded Walt of a pandering anime character. He had the sudden urge to laugh. Less than a year ago, he'd had to worry about taking out the trash, given himself ulcers over whether an unknown young stage actor had the kind of abs that could shatter an already-cracked relationship. Now, he was hiding in a bush with a laser pistol in one hand and a grease-blacked katana in the other while a team of human-hunting alien seamonsters slapped their way down a sunny Los Angeles suburb. Why ever plan for anything?

  The three beings crossed the lawn of another Spanish-style manor three houses down, sticking near its front as they advanced towards the smoking chimney. When they reached the neighboring house, one squid posted up behind a pillar and aimed its guns up at the blank windows. The other two crossed an overgrown, yellowing side yard for the porch of the smoking house.

  Up and across the street, a flock of pigeons burst from a third-story window. The aliens whirled. From the window above and behind Walt, a needle-pointed arrow slashed the air, thunking through the closest alien's skull. Yellow fluid splashed the porch. A second arrow pierced the body of the posted-up squid before it could return fire, crumpling it in a sprawl of squiggling limbs. Blue lines appeared between their claws and Mia's window. Under the brush, Walt took aim and lased through the neck of the unwounded squid. The arrow-wounded survivor rose, uttered a noise exactly like a human gasp, and turned its weapon on him.

  Another arrow knocked it back down, jutting from one of its many armpits. Walt fired, singeing its face before it yanked itself away from his beam. A return shot scorched the thorny brush three inches to his right, clogging his nose with thick wet smoke. His next shot missed. An icy heat licked across his left forearm; his hand jerked reflexively, firing wild. He smelled burnt hair and sausage. The alien picked itself up, guns leveled. An arrow hissed between them, piercing its throat and pinning it to the patchy yard.

  Walt rolled out from under the bushes. Laser ready, he jogged up to the pinned body. Yellowy, mucosal blood guttered from its wounds. He raised his katana and struck off its head.

  Down the street, Otto kicked open a front door and sprinted around the corner where the flier had touched down. Walt severed the heads of the other two creatures and knelt for their guns, carefully tapping the pads he'd discovered that sent them into a safety-like sleep mode. Across the street, the door creaked open.

  "Don't have too much fun there," Mia accused, bow slung over her shoulders.

  He flicked his sword, slinging gore. "Enjoyment in one's work is one of the keys to a fulfilling—" A gut-shaking explosion downstreet made them both wince. Greasy smoke uncoiled over the rooftops. Otto's shoes smacked pavement. Walt grinned, slung the pistols into his pack, and sheathed his sword. David wanted to study the aliens' gear, so Walt knelt to gather it up, disabling the tracking devices with a sleep mode similar to that on the guns—they'd hunted him down in Arizona because he hadn't seen a simple on/off switch. "Don't even think we needed the pigeons."

  She jerked her chin at his forearm. "Are you hurt?"

  He glanced down at the raw spot. His skin was pink
ened, an uneven line of hair obliterated or reduced to small black curls. "Like the wise man said, pain don't hurt."

  "God, I miss movies." She glanced at Otto as he pulled up beside them, panting. "Did you blow the ship?"

  "To seven different hells, girl."

  "Bikes," Walt said. "Gloat later."

  They were near the crest of the hill before they heard the far-off whine of another flier; by the time the bombs fell, crumping, as removed as the howls of a wolf, they were more than a mile away. Walt pulled off the road anyway, holing up in a shoe store in a busted-up strip mall.

  "Question," Mia said in tones that would have passed in a library. "Did anyone think that would go that well?"

  Otto shrugged his bearish shoulders. "We got surprise, planning, cunning, homefield advantage. Can't ask for much more." He twitched his gray mustache, considering. "Besides a column of armor and some Warthogs up high."

  "That went about as well as a monster-fight can go. It was like we had the cheat code for Contra."

  "Well, the next level of a video game is always harder than the last." Walt had a bad feeling as soon as he spoke the words; absurdly, he remembered playing Battletoads as a kid. Specifically, the level where his toad-warrior mounted up on a hovering scooter and he had to dodge upright obstacles that resembled giant sticks of original-flavor gum. They came one after the other, faster and faster, until his scooter was speeding so fast it inevitably resulted in his craft being smashed and his froggy body being flung to its death on the far side of the screen. By the end of the course, reflexes were simply not enough. The only way to make it out the other side was to know in advance the location of every single stick.