The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 59

  He switched out his rifle for the shotgun. The door was unlocked—who knew if aliens even knew what locks were. The foyer was dark. Blue light flashed from the family room in sharp and jarring bursts. Ness curled around the doorway, sweeping his shotgun across the entryway where he used to stomp off the snow and pry off his boots. The boards along the wood-paneled wall were sturdy and hardly ever squeaked. He crossed to the linoleum kitchen. Shawn's rifle boomed. Plaster sprayed in puffs from the family room wall. Glass shattered, spraying the floor. Tentacles rose from the couch and wriggled like tapeworms exposed to the air.

  Ness stalked forward. He moved in perfect silence, but two fat limbs climbed to face him. A bulbous head popped up from behind the couch, fist-sized eyes goggling. Ness shotgunned it. Mucosal blood globbed the curtains, thick and yellow. A second alien swung out from the cover of the couch, slashing its blue laser across the room. Ness ducked, the beam sizzling into the wooden side of the counter behind him. He fired back. A tentacle spun across the room. The beam jerked upward, burning through the ceiling. Ness pumped, fired again, hulling its body. Kelpy organs slithered to the shag carpet, the guts off-yellow and quivering. The thing staggered. Ness shot it again, dispersing its head across the coffee table.

  He fell to a crouch, sweeping the shotgun across the starlit room. A piece of glass fell from the window frame. Ness jerked so hard he fired the shotgun into the wall.

  "Shawn?" he called.

  "You in there, buddy?"

  "I got them!" He leapt around the couch, clearing the space between it and the wall. Cold wind gushed through the broken sliding doors. "What now?"

  "Cover the front door. Hang on."

  Ness turned to face the front of the house, straining into the darkness. Outside, feet whispered through grass and crunched over glass. Ness glanced back to the shattered windows. Shawn stepped high over the jagged glass in the bottom of the sill.

  "Holy Moses, it stinks like yesterday's crab legs in here." He gazed over the fallen aliens, laughter barking from his throat. "You ruined these sons of bitches. 'Mad Dog' Hook. That's what we're gonna call you."

  "No we're not," Ness said. "Shouldn't we be clearing the house?"

  "Yeah, if you don't feel like getting shot."

  Shawn went room to room, sweeping his rifle around corners like a SWAT officer. They found no more aliens. Just various tools, spindly and metal; small metal bits stamped with icons, like the pieces of a strange game; a few displays and touchpads. Ness' heart leapt. Alien computers?

  "We'll worry about those in a minute," Shawn said. "Right now we got to bring the jeep around."

  They jogged down the steep mountain road, following it to the base of the mountain. They found a couple of bikes in a house on the main road and raced around the mountain to Moscow. The jeep was still waiting by the crater in the road. Shawn nosed the car around the hole and drove straight on back to the gravel road to the Rogers' farm. There, he climbed into the turret of the .50 cal and watched the house until he was certain nothing had shown up in the hour they'd been gone.

  Together, he and Ness hauled the first body to the jeep. Its tentacles were as rubbery as they looked. Its pincer-limbs wore a foamy layer over the hardness of their chitin.

  "I think they've got some kind of sixth sense," Ness said. "Either that or eyes on the back of their butt. I didn't make a noise and one still sensed me coming."

  "Maybe it could smell your fear," Shawn said. He grunted and leveraged the body onto the hood of the car, stew-thick blood spattering from its gunshot wound. "Give me a hand here."

  Ness gaped. "This isn't a trophy buck. This is proof of the alien presence on Earth. You don't just sling it over your car!"

  "You want to prove these things are real, right? What's more convincing than riding into town with a goddamn alien tied to the hood of your jeep?"

  Ness shook his head, failing to find a counterargument. He helped push the sagging body up the jeep, where Shawn tied it down with bungee and extension cords. As a compromise, they loaded the other corpse into the back. Ness bagged up the two lasers along with several of their tools and knickknacks, carefully wrapping the devices he suspected were computers in Tim's old shirts.

  Shawn rolled his eyes. "You even find a way to make a gunfight nerdy."

  "Two kills under my belt," Ness said. "How many you got?"

  Shawn chuckled and started the jeep. The dash clock read 3:53 in the morning. His adrenaline long gone, Ness slept most of the drive back to Hanford, woken often by the wind's cold grasp and the slap of tentacles against the hood of the car.

  Shawn shook him awake for good. The dash said it was nearly seven in the morning. The eastern hills showed hints of dawn. Dust spewed behind the jeep. Shawn banged across the bridge, the river a black band beneath them, and skidded to a halt in front of the picnic tables. Coleman lanterns painted hard white light across workers blinking over the steam of their breakfasts.

  "Behold!" Shawn leaped from the car, sweeping his hands at the alien tied down to their car. "Holy fucking shit!"

  A few workers edged closer, asking how Shawn killed it, where he'd found it, whether there were more. Most people kept their distance. Strangely quiet. Suspiciously undisturbed by the abrupt delivery of an interstellar cadaver.

  "No big deal," Shawn said, frowning at Ness, tracking the same train of thought. "I mean, here we got E.T.'s bloody corpse, but whatever. I'm sure you'll remember to scream once you've had a little more coffee."

  "There are aliens," Nick said. "We know."

  "What do you mean, you know?" Ness flung his hands wide. "When we left last night, you guys were denying their very existence."

  "That's when they came by to let us know." Nick nodded off to the side. In the shadows of the nearest longhouse, four men with machine guns watched the proceedings. One lifted a radio to his mouth and murmured into it, eyes locked on Ness. Nick gazed in disgust at the alien body. "Daniel said he'd just heard the news. Someone took down the mothership, man. The aliens, they're toast."

  Ness stared blankly. "How? All of them?"

  "I don't know. Somebody kamikaze-crashed the ship into L.A. No survivors."

  Shawn spat and swore. "Somebody could have thought to mention that before we rushed off to get our asses barbecued."

  Ness could only go on staring. He was still trying to figure out what to do when Roan arrived from across the river to arrest him for treason.

  III:

  PREDATORS

  26

  She rushed the first guard, a smooth wooden baton in each hand. She swept the first stick through an outward arc, intercepting the tip of his rifle, then drove her hand forward, leveraging the gun away from her body. It fired, bullet banging past her. She rammed the other baton end-first into the knight's solar plexus.

  She was not a large woman. She hadn't weighed herself in months, but she doubted she cracked 120 pounds, meaning the man she was currently reducing to a moaning heap outweighed her by half as much. She hadn't practiced with a live partner in nearly as long as she'd last stepped on a scale. Not since Alden's abduction. After so much static practice, adjusting to the reactions of a living, breathing opponent wasn't too different from trying to swim on dry land.

  All these things worked against her. Working for her, she had surprise and madness.

  The man fell with a groan. A second rifle swung toward her chest. She cracked her right-hand baton into the soldier's knuckles, splitting them to the bone. The rifle boomed, the round going hopelessly wide. She jabbed her other stick straight up into the soft hollow beneath his jaw. His teeth clacked. He staggered back into the wall, grasping his throat, rifle forgotten, lungs rasping as he fought for breath. Tristan whirled on King Dashing. His deep eyes rounded. He backed up, banging into the table.

  She didn't see the blow that dropped her. Her beating was more gentle than in Flagstaff. When they finished, they dragged her to a bare room and laid her on a futon. Lady Winslowe gazed out the dark window as a young woman
with a long brown braid tended to Tristan's wounds.

  Tristan watched her, too exhausted and aching to rise. "I'll kill any man you try to put on me."

  Winslowe rolled her eyes. "Please. His Majesty is no savage. His stock must have teeth."

  "Then why are you cleaning me up? Why not put a bullet past what's left of my dentistry?"

  "Because Lord Dashing needs servants to tend to his stock."

  Tristan stared at the off-white ceiling. Cobwebs grayed one corner. "And you expect me to serve. And not run, flee, or commit regicide."

  Lady Winslowe smiled in bemusement. "You'll serve. That's what Yvette here is for."

  Tristan eyed the brown-haired woman washing the blood from her body. Yvette was no older than Tristan herself. Thinner and lighter, too. If Winslowe thought this waif was going to hold Tristan down, she was deluded.

  She soon learned what Winslowe really meant. Tristan was put to work the next day. Ribs aching, face puffy, she followed Yvette room to room through the harem on the upper floor, removing dirty dishes from dressers, stripping stained sheets from the beds, emptying trash bins spilling over with wadded tissues. Everywhere she went, Yvette went with her, brown eyes following Tristan's every move. Meanwhile, armed knights slouched about the lounge, playing pool and flirting lazily with any woman allowed downstairs.

  Despite the presence of Yvette and the knights, Tristan tried her first escape that afternoon, making a run to the patio while Yvette peeled potatoes with her back turned. The rumble of the sliding door gave Tristan away; Yvette screamed out before she hit the grass. Two knights rode Tristan down just as she caught sight of the fence: high fieldstone topped by three lines of barb wire.

  The riders returned her to her room without comment or harm. Lady Winslowe arrived minutes later.

  "Everyone gets one chance to learn there's no escape," she said.

  "What happens after the second try?" Tristan said.

  "His Majesty's mercy takes a vacation."

  Winslowe locked the door behind her. The bedroom had no books, no stereo, nothing to divert Tristan. Her ribs were still too sore for full kung fu practice, so she drilled her forms instead.

  Yvette didn't return for another two hours. Without a word, she began folding her laundry, eyes intent on the lavender-scented linen.

  "Why would you yell?" Tristan said.

  "They'd beat me if I didn't."

  "Just give me a one minute head start."

  "You shouldn't try to flee from the man who safeguards your well-being," Yvette murmured.

  "You don't really believe that."

  "That he wants to keep us healthy and safe? Why does he feed us? Clothe us? Guard us from raiders?"

  "As a cheap source of docile labor?"

  Yvette gave her a side-eyed glance, then flicked her fingertips at the world beyond their room. "And survival out there is so simple and carefree."

  "Right now?" Tristan said. "It's easy enough. There's enough food left in the houses to keep all the survivors alive for years. I'd rather feed myself through robbery than prostitution."

  Yvette smoothed a camisole and threaded its straps through a hooked hanger. "He's gentler than you'd think."

  Tristan watched her fold another strapped shirt. "You want to be one of them, don't you? That's why you yell."

  Yvette pursed her lips and turned to her socks. "You'd rather scrub dishes and mop floors ten hours a day?"

  "I'd rather hop that fence."

  "Please don't. I don't want to yell again. Our lives could be worse, Tristan."

  Tristan let her have the last word. Less than a year ago, Yvette's capitulation would have outraged her, filled her with a hapless fury and the irresistible urge to lecture her about the dangers of accepting the assumptions of a patriarchal hierarchy designed to keep everyone with a vagina underpaid, undervalued, and permanently available for uncompensated childcare. Not that she would have used all those terms, exactly, but neither had she considered her position the slightest bit extreme. As if wanting more than 15% of the seats in Congress or equal pay for the same job was so "radical."

  But that had been the Tristan of another world. She no longer had the time or energy to convert this woman. Not if she wanted to escape and find Alden. There was a bitter edge to her mindset, too. Yvette wanted to serve up her body in exchange for meals and a roof? Then that was what she deserved.

  Escape, however, proved quite impossible. Tristan was locked up all night. All day, Yvette followed her like a judging shadow—while they worked, while they ate, even while she went to the bathroom. The young women and boys in the upstairs bedrooms hardly gave Tristan a second look, but Yvette's eyes never left her.

  Neither did those of a twenty-something man who acted as squire to the knights, which meant, given their propensity to hang around the pool table drinking canned beer, that the young man spent as much time in the clubhouse-palace as he did out tending to the horses. When he was inside, he waited at the lounge wall, one eye on the knights in case they wanted another Bud, while his other eye followed Tristan on her duties. He had a lined jaw and active eyes that seemed to carry as many answers as questions. After enduring three days of his wordless gazing, Tristan finished vacuuming, coiled up the cord, and walked right up to him at the wall.

  "What?" she said.

  The young man smiled. "Just watching you move."

  "That's creepy."

  His eyebrows shot up. "No, not creepy-watching. I'm trying to see if I can believe you beat down those two guards."

  Tristan shrugged. "All they had were guns."

  "So it's true?"

  "All housemaids know kung fu. Guild by-law."

  He laughed, corners of his eyes crinkling. "My name's Colin, and I like you."

  She stared at him levelly. "Let me know when that will do me any good."

  "That depends on what you want," he grinned.

  She glanced at the knights. One leaned over the pool table, cue plunging forward and back as he sized up his shot. Another sat on a leather loveseat, one arm wrapped around the waist of the woman seated in his lap, the other hand moving rhythmically beneath her dress. Tristan hadn't yet figured out which of the harem were off-limits and which were literally up for grabs. This was how Dashing sustained the knights' loyalty, she supposed. The woman's gaze was a million miles away.

  "To find my brother," Tristan said lowly.

  "That's why you came here?" Colin said.

  "I heard His Majesty had boys who looked like him. Even if my brother weren't here, Dashing might have had an idea where to find him."

  "What's he look like?"

  Tristan described Alden, named him, mentioned the circumstances of their capture. "Why? You know a lot of teenage boys?"

  "The universe is a mysterious place," Colin said. "You never know when it will burp up what you want."

  She frowned at him. Yvette stared at her from across the room. Tristan rejoined her, accepting a thick-bristled brush to swab out the fireplace with.

  Days disappeared into the past. She rose before dawn to clean the kitchen while the angry old woman who ran it cooked homegrown vegetables and mixed them in with canned goods. After she and Yvette brought the meals to the women upstairs, they returned downstairs with the harem's dirty sheets and washed them in big plastic garbage bins—the clubhouse had power, but no running water. Afternoons they spent cleaning the palace, dusting, scrubbing, and vacuuming each room on a weekly cycle.

  After dinner, they were locked in their room, which was placed on the second floor of the clubhouse. Windowless. An old storage closet or something. It locked with a key; the screws on the lock plate were on the outside of the door.

  Two weeks into Tristan's confinement, Lady Winslowe entered with two guards. Yvette looked down at her stitching. Winslowe went straight for Tristan. "Stand."

  Tristan uncoiled slowly. One guard kept a pistol trained on her while the other hauled her mattress from the box spring. Tristan's heart raced with angry despair.
The guard handed her shiv to Winslowe, who examined the sharpened plastic comb with open disgust.

  "What was this for?" the woman said.

  "Flossing," Tristan said.

  "With a blade?"

  She lifted her lip, revealing the two-tooth gap on the left side of her mouth. "I get whole pigs stuck in here sometimes. Have to stab them till they wriggle out."

  Winslowe gazed down on her with the air of a husband who's caught his wife's new dog shitting on the rug. "Or perhaps you fancied a room to yourself."

  She departed with the guards. Yvette threaded another cross through her pattern. "Is that true?"

  "That you sold me out?" Tristan said. "Most definitely."

  "That you planned to stab me."

  "Why would anyone want to stab a sweet young thing like you?"

  Yvette glared up from her fabric. "Because they want to run off. In silence. Bought with a knife."

  "It wasn't much of a knife." Tristan lugged her mattress back into place. "I was going to have to work pretty hard to get your head off."

  Yvette's mouth dropped open. "You're a monster."

  "I wasn't really going to cut off your head. It would take too long. All you need is a line across the throat."

  "A king doesn't let monsters walk free through his castle. See what you get."

  Tristan went still. "What are you talking about?"

  "You'll see. You'll see what you get."

  She did, and very soon. Winslowe returned with a set of prison-issue leg bracelets. The guards held Tristan down while the Lady Winslowe clamped the chains around her ankles. At full extension of the chain, Tristan almost but couldn't quite take a full step. Running was out of the question. Each step jerked just short of what she was used to. She could have throttled Yvette. Beaten her as the man in Flagstaff had beaten Tristan. Winslowe left the cuffs on her at all times. Even when Tristan complained that she needed to change her jeans, Winslowe simply had one of the knights cut them right from her legs, along with her underwear. Tristan crouched in a corner, envisioning how she would break their arms with thrusts of her palms, collapse their throats with chops from her hand's edge, burst their eyes with flicks of her fingers.