The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Read online

  "I'm not a beanbag chair. I'm not a beagle. I'm not your property."

  "Orders say we keep you here." The mask muffled the soldier's voice as thoroughly as it did his face. "They think we can break this thing. It's time for all of us to step up."

  Days crawled by, as foolish and horrid as a half-crushed spider, as divorced from life as a button on a calculator, marked by blood-draws and meal times and the morning/evening lights-on/lights-off. Without notice, Walt was rousted by a heavy knock four days later. He dressed in darkness, angry and sleepy, and joined the others in the garage, where they milled for most of an hour before a pair of soldiers ordered them into the truck.

  The truck blew through streetlights that kept changing despite having no one to change for. Walt rocked as they turned southwards. Cold wind cut through the gaps in the canvas and he snugged his loose clothes to his body. Once, he thought he heard a gunshot; another time, a scream. The truck strolled along, weaving irregularly. Out the back, in the dimmest light he'd ever seen in downtown Manhattan, Walt saw bloody bodies in the lanes, charred shells of burnt-out cars. Despite their sluggish pace, the drive didn't last long.

  To Walt, the port looked how he imagined the rest of the world would look in another fifty years: dingy and abandoned, a useless leftover of the dead. Grime marred the grout between the time-beiged tiles that covered the floor and the lower half of the walls. High-backed wooden benches lined the terminal, the wood's grain fuzzed by salt air and the asses of countless passengers. The room smelled like mold and salt and far-off sweat. The soldiers marched them up a ramp where a massive orange ferry idled alongside a palisade of sea-soaked logs. The wind ruffled Walt's hair, stinging cold, and he was glad for the two-week stubble shielding his face. Out in the bay, lights speckled the black lumps of islands.

  A pair of soldiers shepherded them over to the gently rolling ferry and up the flight of stairs to its top deck. Another pair brought up the rear, posting up at either side of the staircase. The survivors fanned out, taking seats on the plastic benches, gazing silently across the dark bay. Across the two rivers that bracketed Manhattan, the towers of Jersey City and Brooklyn stood dark, pricked by sporadic lights. Boots clunked on the lower deck, just audible over the burbling grumble of the engines. Staten Island. And they'd blown up the bridges. Walt had ridden the ferry there once in college just to see the fifth borough. He'd been shocked to find suburban neighborhoods complete with lawns and wooden fences.

  The engines growled up, churning water and foam. The ferry pulled off with a neck-swaying jerk. The four soldiers watched the two dozen survivors with dispassionate professionalism, rifles slung from their necks, pockets bulging with gear. Beyond the windows, the rails of the observation deck painted dim orange lines over the silhouette of Brooklyn.

  Walt's heart beat so fast he was sure the soldiers would be able to count his pulse by the throb of his carotid. He breathed slowly, inhaling through the nose, exhaling between his lips. That only helped so much. He had no intention of getting hauled to Staten Island just to get locked up there, too.

  He thought he might die. He had resolved to risk it. A large part of him welcomed it. But he still feared—what? The irrationality of death? Even those who thought they had all the answers, the right Reverend Frank Phillips, for instance, well, those answers made no fucking sense. If there were a heaven, which there wasn't, how could it possibly function? His heaven would be with Vanessa; he had no delusions hers would include him, at least not in any capacity greater than an awkward semi-friendship. How could the two paradises coexist? In his perfect heaven, would his Vanessa be just a specter, a perfect simulacrum, while the real Vanessa spent eternity in her own separate bliss, charming men at parties, chugging champagne without hangovers, her face on every cloud? Yet how could it be perfect if he knew the woman he was with wasn't the real thing? Was heaven then a series of parallel paradises, each one honed for its individual inhabitant, no more or less real than any of the others? If so, what about the alternate-Vanessa forced to inhabit his heaven? Wouldn't he effectively be raping her? The alternate-her wouldn't even know the real her would never share his bed. So either Vanessa would be forced to be with him, or he'd be forced to be without her. Either way, one would suffer. One wouldn't know heaven.

  He knew the out: in the divine hereafter, earthbound romance would seem irrelevant, a gravel-crumb's worth of joy beside the mountain that is His Truth. That, above all else, proved it was all a sham.

  Hell was more laughable yet, a ghost story meant to scare kids from stealing toy cars at the supermarket. Reincarnation was pointless because, with no knowledge of your past lives, you may as well never have lived them in the first place. Heavens, hells, rebirths—what else was there? The great crushing nothing, the permanent mute button? Too absurd to dissect. If there were nothing, you wouldn't even know it when you began to experience that nothing. Regardless, that nothing, he believed, was the truth, but—

  Outside, the ferry cut east, putting more space between itself and Brooklyn as it vectored to Staten Island. He was out of time.

  Walt raised his hand. "I need to go to the bathroom."

  "Hold it," a soldier said.

  Walt didn't really have to piss—just a bluff, a pardon to get up and walk around—but something about being denied the base right to go to the bathroom made him want to choke the soldier until vertebrae cracked free of the man's skin like ice cubes from a tray. Walt stood and sprinted for the doors to the deck. A soldier shouted behind him. He slid the door open and rushed onto the concrete platform. Sea winds buffeted his face, stealing his breath away, wetting his eyes with tears. He sprinted down the deck toward faraway Manhattan, thumping the metal floor.

  A soldier spilled out the open door and leveled his rifle. "Stop right there!"

  Walt laughed madly. "I didn't kill my wife!"

  The soldier stepped forward. Walt thought: I love you. He vaulted the gut-high rail, palm slipping on the spray-damp metal, and plunged headfirst over the side. The ocean roiled above him, the liquid sky of an upturned world.

  9

  How did you keep upright when the ground kept sliding away beneath your feet? Two days after Raymond discovered his ostensible boss Kevin Murckle was a drug dealer, which meant Raymond himself had been unwittingly slinging, Murckle dispatched Hu to call him and Bill into his office. Raymond stuck a smile to his lips and nodded.

  "I'll be right there."

  It was one thing to have wanted to sell a couple ounces of weed to his friends. Murckle deceiving him into delivering bricks of God knows, coke or heroin or meth, that could get him locked up for years. It was the lie as much as the crime that bothered Raymond. Murckle could've hired any number of couriers who'd have no qualms making dropoffs for a payday. Instead, he'd turned to the desperate, exploiting them for twelve bucks an hour. Raymond walked into the office ready to resign.

  From the far side of the sun-bright room, Murckle held up his palm. "You two just stick right there, why don't you." The white of his surgical mask stood out from his tanned orange skin. "These carpets are too nice for me to start upchucking blood on them."

  Bill smiled tightly. "What's up?"

  "I've got something here that needs to be in the city. Here isn't the city."

  "My goodness."

  "That's what I said. But then I thought, Hey, I've got you two. You two can take it into the city for me."

  "Today?" Raymond said.

  Murckle wagged a finger. "Tonight. The recipient is a night person."

  "I have plans with my wife."

  "Do those plans include explaining how you got fired less than a week after you got hired?"

  "That would be a crummy idea of a date."

  "Then take her out tomorrow instead. Problem solved." Murckle shook his shaggy head. "See why I get the big bucks?"

  He turned to his computer, tilted back his head to see through his reading glasses. Bill and Raymond shared a look and saw themselves out.

  "What do
you think?" Raymond murmured in the hall.

  Bill rubbed the stubble on the back of his head, lips pursed. "Nighttime delivery to east LA? Can only be one thing: bibles."

  "What do you think he'd do if we said no?"

  "Fire us for sure. Possibly frame us. Or hire some boys off Craigslist to shove a boot up our ass."

  Raymond frowned at the abstract painting down the hall, as if expecting to spot Hu's eyes blinking behind two holes in the bright splashes of color. "Maybe we should think about calling the cops."

  "With my record, man? We might as well cut out the middleman and drive straight to Lompoc." Bill folded his thick arms. "Look, guys like Murckle, you don't walk out on them with a handshake and well-wishes for your future endeavors or some shit. You got to leave with enough leverage so they don't hit back."

  "So we take pictures of where we're going and who's picking it up."

  "For a start. I'm going to let Craig know what to do if we don't come back."

  "Does he know?"

  Bill's chest bounced with laughter. "You kidding? If Craig knew the details, he would kill that man. Not over the dirtiness of the deed, mind you, but because Murckle's not giving us our cut."

  Raymond came back that night with the revolver and a digital camera. Hu pulled a seal-sleek black sedan up to the gates and repeated the address. Bill got in behind the wheel, grinning as he closed the door.

  "What do you bet this thing's registered to somebody's grandma in Arizona?"

  Raymond shook his head. "I'm so far out of my element right now I'm expecting to see fish any minute."

  The ocean roared in the dark behind them. Bill wound down the cliffside road, city lights twinkling from Malibu to Long Beach, and cut through town to the 110. The freeway was wide open as Montana, sparsely dotted with headlights. Abandoned cars gleamed from the shoulder.

  "I never seen it this empty," Bill said. "Place is deader than my dachshund."

  "I heard they're mobilizing the National Guard."

  "What do you think? This the end times we got here?"

  "During World War I, an outbreak of the flu killed like fifty million people."

  "Jesus. We're talking about like the Black Death here."

  "The thing about diseases is the deadly ones burn themselves out." Raymond fiddled with the camera, checking the zoom, its light levels. "A strain can't pass itself on if it kills its host too fast. AIDS used to kill people in months. Now nobody dies from it."

  In the dim light of approaching headlights, Bill smiled with half his mouth. "Not here where we got money. But tell that to Africa."

  He switched lanes, peeled down an offramp. Two- and three-story apartments crowded the lots. Silhouetted men crouched on stoops, metal glinting in their hands. In an Albertsons parking lot, people slept on rows of cots under plastic tarps, attended to by men in masks and white coats. While Bill idled at a light, a man pulled a windowless van into the lot, hopped out, and snapped a pair of rubber gloves past his wrists.

  Bill whistled. "Be grateful you live in your little beach world, kid."

  "What's going on out here?"

  "If some too-big-for-its-britches flu can kill fifty million people before we put a monkey into space, why can't its great-great grandson take out a billion?"

  Sirens bayed. Raymond gripped the camera in his lap. A cop car tore down the boulevard, whooshing through the intersection. The light changed and they rolled on. Chain link fences bordered weedy lots. Smashed windows gaped from storefronts, some covered by taped-down tarps. Garbage spilled from corner bins. Upstreet, a man jogged across the empty lanes.

  Bill swerved around a burnt-down couch, cursing under his breath. Debris caltropped the outer lane, toppled chairs and busted bottles and sharded plates, funneling the car to the turn lane. Ahead, a metal gate stretched across the middle of the road.

  "What the hell is this?" Bill slowed. Beyond the gate, a man in a leather jacket stood with his feet apart, a rifle angled over his shoulder. "You got your piece?"

  Raymond touched the bulge in his waistband. "Maybe we should turn around."

  "Hang on. Stay frosty."

  The car rocked to a stop. The man strode around the gate, keeping the rifle shouldered, and approached the driver's side. From five feet away, he bent at the waist and rolled his hand in the air. Bill cracked the window a couple inches.

  "What's up?"

  The man leaned closer. "What's your business in the neighborhood?"

  "My business?" Bill cocked his head. "I got a delivery for one of your villagers, man."

  "Who you going to see?"

  "I'm just a pizza boy, I'm not the Godfather. I got his address."

  The man glanced past the gate while Bill recited their destination. He nodded absently. "You get in and you get out. Any problems, don't expect to leave."

  He strolled toward the gate. A radio crackled on his hip. He mumbled into it, eyeing the car, and swung the gate back with a rusty creak. Bill edged forward. Raymond smelled smoke. Two blocks on, a bonfire gushed flame and smoke in an empty lot to their right. Beside it, two men with white rags over their mouths swung a long, heavy bag between them, building momentum, then chucked it into the fire and stumbled back. Plastic melted away. An arm flopped between the timbers. The men walked to a pickup with its tailgate down and hauled another body off the bed.

  Bill leaned forward and squinted through the tinted glass. "Should be that apartment block up there."

  "You mean the one with the skull and crossbones spraypainted on the doors?"

  "That's the one." Men watched from the opposite sidewalk as they pulled into the lot. Bill let the car idle, glancing front and back. "This is a dumbass plan. Just sitting."

  "Repeat after me: twelve bucks an hour. Twelve bucks an hour."

  "Take this shit for ourselves. Find some palace on a lonely Mexican hilltop until this thing goes away."

  Raymond unbuckled his seatbelt. "Why haven't you left town?"

  Bill shrugged his big shoulders. "Where am I going to go? At least here I know my way around."

  A man walked out from behind the apartment block, hands in his jean pockets, shoulders drawn tight. Raymond sat upright. "Suppose that's him?"

  "See if he responds to Murckle's Bat Signal." Bill flashed the headlights, twice short, once long. The man bobbed forward and leaned down to the window, toothpick tucked in the corner of his mouth.

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah what?" Bill said.

  "You my guys?"

  "Guess so. Stuff's in the—"

  Raymond elbowed Bill in the ribs. "He wasn't supposed to speak to us."

  Across the street, a man hollered, "Don't you open that door! You keep your sickness in there!"

  "What?" Bill said.

  "He's supposed to go straight to the trunk," Raymond said. "That's the routine."

  "We got a problem?" the man with the toothpick said.

  From the apartment stoop, an old man with a crown of white hair waved his fist at a small crowd that had pulled up in the middle of the street at a safe distance from the plague-house. The man gritted his teeth and took a gingerly step toward them.

  "Not another step, old man!"

  "What did you say your name was?" Bill said to the man beyond the window, one hand drifting toward his waistband.

  The toothpick-chewing man beat him to it. The streetlamps gleamed on the sight of his black semiauto pointed at Bill's face. "It's Mister Hand Over Your Fucking Shit."

  Raymond's heart roared. Bill slowly raised his hands. "It's cool, man. Stuff's in the trunk."

  "So open it before I open your skull."

  "I have to reach for the button. Be cool."

  Flame sparked from the street. Two men jogged toward the old man, burning bottles in hand, and slung them through the ground-floor windows. With a deep whoomp, fire blossomed inside, lighting the faces of those in the street. The man with the toothpick flinched, glancing toward the flames. Bill swept out his own pistol. The window shattered; thre
e ear-cracking bangs roared from the gun. Raymond smelled spent gunpowder. Beyond the broken window, the man with the toothpick stumbled back, air leaving his lungs in compressive grunts, and dropped to the grimy asphalt.

  From a dark window on the third floor, a gun flashed and popped. The people in the street screamed and scattered. Two retreated in a crouch, going for guns, firing back. Smoke gushed from the downstairs windows. A young couple piled out the front door dragging two young girls behind them, their free hands pressing bloody handkerchiefs to their mouths. Gunfire erupted from the far sidewalk, pummeling the family down in the doorway.

  "What the fuck," Bill said.

  "Go!" Raymond found his revolver. His hand shook too hard to aim. The car jolted backwards, tires whining. Something ripped into the rear door with a great metal clunk. "They're shooting at us!"

  "Get your fucking head down."

  Glass sprayed inward from the rear window. In the street, a young man in a white wifebeater went down hard, spurting blood. The car chunked over the curb, jolting Raymond's spine. Smoke clogged the street, lit by irregular flashes of gunshots, pierced by screams and sobs. Bill tore down the middle lane. Before the gate, he swung right, hunched over the wheel, hunting for an unblocked route back to the freeway. Beyond terse directions, neither of them spoke until they were back on the wide empty lanes.

  "I am not one to pass judgment lightly," Bill said, knuckles clinching the wheel, "but fuck that."

  "That was crazy. That was more East Berlin than East LA."

  "I'll tell you this. Murckle's smarter than he looks. He saw the writing on the wall."

  Raymond shoved the revolver back in his waistband. The cold metal stung his skin. He wanted suddenly to be away from it, to pitch it out the window. He'd been pretending at this for reasons he didn't completely understand—as if he needed to prove he could be as scary as the world was quickly becoming—but now all he wanted was to be home.

  "I'm not coming in tomorrow. I'm not a guy who shoots people. I thought I could do it to protect myself, but that family on the stairs—"

  "I am a man who'll shoot a man, and none of us are coming in tomorrow." Bill wiped sweat from his chin, glaring past the steering wheel.