Breakers (18 page)

"You definitely need a new car," Mia said.

He craned around. White liquid streaked his seats. "I look forward to killing them some day."

They transferred the birds into dog crates and carried the crates beneath the deck and scattered seeds in the crates.

"Now we just need a rooster," Mia said.

Raymond didn't know where everyone had gone or whether they'd ever see anyone else, but he didn't think he would mind. They ate eggs by the end of the week, the rich yolks sopping into their rice. Some days he didn't change out of his track pants. During the next hot spell, he and Mia didn't dress at all unless it was time to work, lying naked in the shade of the deck, her slim brown body filmed with sweat.

Once a week, they broke into a house and pulled dry goods from pantries and shelves, snagging batteries and books and clothing; they drove to movie theaters and collected cases of M&Ms and Coke and unpopped popcorn, some of which they planted to see what would happen. Beyond foraging, tending the garden, and their water-gathering, they had little work. With no insurance payments or oil changes, no junk mail to sort or Facebook to update, no jobs or dental appointments or dry cleaning, Raymond marveled at how little time it took to survive. The days stretched as broad as the ocean beyond their window. They surfed, went on walks, picnicked in the grass in the shadow of the lighthouse, fucked on the sand in the open sunlight. They napped and read and explored. One day, Mia surprised him with a carload of paints and brushes and canvases. He converted one of the empty bedrooms to a studio and started painting: the bay, the silent smokestacks of the power plant in Redondo, the misty hills of Malibu.

He was simply happy, and so was she. Find a partner. Find a piece of land and make it your own. That's all it took. This was more or less what people were trying to do pre-Panhandler, too, but that had been complicated by the pursuit of money, which was necessary to obtain all the things you couldn't do for yourself (such as, for almost every first-world citizen, grow your own food) and to support yourself into old, old age—80, 90, 100 years old!—in the midst of a world of 7 billion people, all of them seeking a plot of good land for themselves, with most of the best stuff already owned by a small fraction of humanity. No wonder life had sucked for most of them, self included. There just wasn't enough to go around. Not if a happy life required working toward watching a 59" 1080p HDTV after 27 years of retirement at age 92.

Not that returning to subsistence farming and dying at 64 would have solved all Western woes. Raymond recognized that much of what he and Mia had now was the result of the labor of millions who were no longer around to need it. He sure as hell couldn't have been able to forge himself a shovel, let alone build the batteries they used in their flashlights and radios. Some day, possibly within his lifetime, there would come a time when all these materials would be used up, leaving the next generations to relearn how to navigate by sea and extract metal from dirt. Their life by the sea would no doubt be much meaner if they had to grow enough not just to feed themselves, but to barter for all the goods they were currently lifting from the empty homes and stores.

Whatever, though. No matter how you broke down the causes and what-ifs—and he had all the time in the world to do that—he was happier than he'd ever been just gardening, surfing, fishing, foraging, and having sex. The only technological entertainment that entered the picture was listening to AM radio at night when the broadcasts were clearest and it was too dark to do anything else.

"And now," Josh Jones said, voice carrying over the wash of the surf and the warm, moist air of an early September night that would change everything all over again, "the report that will ruin whatever credibility I've built with you fine survivors of Southern California. I know you're out there. We dealt with way too many earthquakes, mudslides, floods, and fires to be done in by a silly old plague.

"To business, then. Really, I don't even know how to put this. Do I just come right out and say it? Because it's going to sound crazy. It's going to sound as if I am a crazy person, or at least a person who is capable of saying crazy things. Beautiful women—if there are any left in the world—will refuse to sleep with me. Dogs will laugh as I pass. Even the kindest of flowers will turn their heads in embarrassment. Maybe some of you out there are recording these broadcasts for posterity or because you know your kids won't be able to read. In that case, there would be a permanent record of my madness. I'll be mocked for generations."

"He sounds like he
has
gone crazy," Mia said.

"So you know what, I'm
not
going to say it. Not explicitly, anyway. I'm just going to tell you to go to your windows and look towards the ocean. It doesn't matter if you can't see the ocean because you were too dumb to move to Venice Beach after all its former residents checked out. Just go to the window, look west, and try to find a soft place to faint."

Raymond grabbed the radio and jogged upstairs, Mia on his heels, and opened the door to the deck. Above the dark bay, points of light hung in the sky on graceful strings, as if the stars had lined up and learned to dance. A great black triangle drifted toward the city, blocking the stars behind it. Individual lights cruised below its mass. A low, penetrating whirr fought with the crash of the waves, a gusty roar like the wind of a semi on the highway. Against the dark background, the vessel was too high to get a good sense of scale, but its simple
presence
was enormous.

"Seen it yet?" Josh said over the radio. "Does that thing look human to you? I've seen just about everything human there is to see, and that does not look human to me."

Raymond dropped a step back. "What's he talking about?"

Mia raised her hand to her throat. "That thing is
huge
."

"First spotted in Japan a few hours ago," Josh said. "You might want to batten down the hatches."

"What the hell is going on?"

"The plague," Mia said. "It all makes sense."

II:
CONTACT

14

On Route 40 nearing Amarillo, Texas, Walt saw a mile marker for a town called Panhandle. Maybe that's why he detoured the opposite way just minutes later, angling south from the highway towards something called Greenbelt Reservoir. More likely he diverted because he already had a collapsible fishing pole and hadn't seen anything more exciting than a soaring hawk for well over a hundred miles, and if he didn't change it up soon, the boredom would do what the plague, riots, U.S. Army, and 1,500 miles of bandits and madmen couldn't: strike him dead.

The same green-yellow prairies and soft hills followed him south. He sweated lightly, then shivered as it evaporated in the cooling dusk. By nightfall, he still hadn't reached the reservoir, but a full moon lit the disused road well enough to continue. He would go on until he got tired, then camp and sleep a ways from the road; if the reservoir wasn't visible when he woke in the morning, he'd turn back and get back on track for LA.

He couldn't have planned it better. After another hour's walk through the dark grass, he crested a modest hill. Moonlight rippled on the surface of the wide, low lake. Birds cooed from shifting reeds. He descended slowly, smelling the mud of the shore and a humid sweetness he hadn't encountered since somewhere east of Oklahoma. The ground stayed hard until he reached the banks. The breeze was too soft to trouble the waters, but small ripples arose from breaching fish.

He spread out his blanket and unfolded his rod and dug out his jar of bait, ridiculous, garlic-stinking, nuclear-colored artificial marshmallowy goo that supposedly brought the fish leaping straight onto shore. He cast, somewhat poorly, then squinted at his bobber, losing it repeatedly amidst the black water.

Either the nostril-hair-withering bait lived up to its billing, however, or the fish had been screwing their fish brains out in the few months since there were no longer any humans around to catch them, because Walt landed two within twenty minutes. He cleaned them inexpertly, flinging the guts back into the water. He slipped the cleaned fish into a Ziploc bag and walked away from the green shore, flashlight in hand, to gather dry grass, twigs, and small sticks, which he tented on the bare ground and lit up with a faltering lighter. He'd shot enough small game along his walk to have picked up a couple pointed metal rods which he used to skew and roast the fish.

He slept under the stars. That was nothing new. He slept outside more than most dogs. The constellations had grown familiar to him, though he didn't know what they were: the tiny kite, the squashed W. When he got up he ate some stale Rold Gold, then stashed the bag and pulled up a handful of cattails instead, stripping away the husk around the base and chewing up the clean, pulpy stems. Minnows flicked in the shallows, retreating when his shadow crossed them. Red-tailed blackbirds chirred from the reeds. For a while he simply wandered along the lake's edge, overturning stones, poking at waterstriders and snails with a stick, staring beneath the surface for trout. Flies buzzed disinterestedly. By noon, it was warm enough to drive him to peel off his shirt and wrap it around his forehead.

He suppressed the nagging feeling he should get back to the highway and on toward LA. A line weaved through the grass; he froze, waiting for the snake to slip away. Ahead, a short, flat spit of land projected into the lake. Weeds swayed in the shallow water between it and a minor island some thirty feet from shore. If he lived here, he could build a simple bridge to it, or find a rowboat somewhere and paddle to it at night to stay safe from animals and survivors. It was an idle thought. Still, he could swim there right now. See what there was to see. But he'd get wet. He might step on something sharp. Anyway, it was just a little circle of land. It wouldn't be any different from everything else around him.

He snorted, peeled off his clothes, stepped into some flip flops, and, otherwise naked, waded into the water. In the shallows, it was calm and warm. Slimy fronds waved around his ankles. Rocks ground underfoot. A school of minnows turned and beelined for the shore to his left. The water rose to his thighs; another step dropped him to his hips. Two more and he was forced to swim, the water warm around his shoulders and neck and frigid when his feet kicked too deep. A few feet from the island, he halted to paddle and extend his legs. Stones turned in the mud. He waded ashore and wiped the extra water from his body.

The air cooled his wet skin. He walked the perimeter to work off the water, turning over riparian stones. Worms squiggled into the mud. Nymphs waved pincers and paddled away. Waterstriders skimmed over the ripples. Red glinted from the mud. Walt poked it with a stick, dislodging a tarnished, algae-swamped Coke can.

Besides a bird's nest containing three ruffle-feathered gray chicks, the can was the most exciting thing he found. He pulled up two more cattails and ate the stems. Fish rose lazily. He swam back across and toweled and dressed.

It wasn't yet noon. He shouldered his gear and circled the lake until he found its source, a modest creek oozing between a jumble of smooth rocks. Trout as long as his palm swatted sunlight from their tails. He cast his line a few times, but the fish did little more than glance the neon bait's way. Light woods surrounded the stream, fuzzing the short hills. After a couple miles of tramping along the trickling water, he stopped to build a fire, fill a pan with water, and fish while he first boiled the water, then moved it off the fire to cool. He gazed at the hills where the creek must source. When the boiled water stopped steaming he refilled his empty bottles and started back for the lake.

He hadn't thought much in the hours since he'd been awake and moving. There'd been too much to see. Exploring the lake had reminded him of a real-life version of
The Legend of Zelda
, the last of which he'd played a couple years ago. It wasn't exactly the same, of course. The
Zelda
dungeons had a designed, logical procession to them. You went into one room to drain the water to reach the lower levels of the next room where you found the small key to unlock the door to the next room where you climbed across the vines on the walls to reach the grappling hook you needed to cross the chasm to reach the big key to open the door to the boss you defeated in order to increase your life meter and make you that much tougher for the next dungeon and the boss at
its
end.

He didn't know what the real-life equivalent of that would be. Something like searching the grounds of a nearby house to find the key to get into the garage to find the scrap wood he needed to build a raft to float to the island in the lake where he'd find the Coke can he needed to trick the baby rattlesnake at the foot of a tree to slither inside so he could climb up to the one branch suitable to make the fishing pole he'd use to catch the trout that would nourish him through the next leg of his walk. Faced with that, you'd just go smash in the window of a Big 5 instead.

But the feel of the worlds was the same. Walt was alone in the woods to explore lost lakes simply to see what was there and what he could do with it. A mundane find like snagging a trout or stumbling into a strawberry patch felt like a blessing. The discovery of a bottle of Ibuprofen or Jim Beam was an outright miracle. Even when there was nothing special to find, when the fish wouldn't bite or Busch Stadium was nothing but an empty crater of grimy seats and patchy grass, the finding of these places, the witnessing of their existence, was holy, in its way. Perhaps when he made it to LA he'd travel America's backroads, mapping lakes and rivers and woods for their own sake. He could go far south, too. Witness the old places, the temples and ruins and ziggurats enfolded in the jungles of the Yucatan.

Walt returned to the highway. He headed west. Some ways past Amarillo, tilted monuments jutted from the plain. He stepped into the wind-swept grass. Amid the dust and sunlight, cars rose from the soil at uniform angles. Each was wrapped in a skin of graffiti. Wind whisked through fenders and side mirrors. There was no sign of smoke or tilled fields in sight. Walt walked down each row of painted cars before doubling back to the highway.