Breakers (30 page)

He glanced at the youngish blonde guy with a bloody bandage around his leg, then back to the woman. "Did you shoot him?"

"No!"

Walt flicked his gun at the stretched-out blonde woman with the holes in her face and chest. "Did you shoot
her
?"

"Of course I did." She glanced at the corpse and snorted. "My husband rescued her from an alien attack on the beach. She was part of a resistance movement. The rest of her platoon got killed on some mission. Maybe that drove her crazy. Maybe she was crazy before. Either way, things got all
Single White Female
in here. After she shot my husband, I shot her." She cocked her head. "Who the fuck are you to care, anyway?"

Walt met eyes with Raymond, who was pale with shock or bloodloss or both. "That what happened?"

"She wanted to kill my wife and stay here with me. She was nuts."

Walt considered the bloody mess that had once been a fit young woman. She was now quite dead. Of course, if everyone who'd killed another person deserved execution, Walt himself would need to be hanged, electrocuted, gassed, and guillotined. There was the matter of whether they were lying about the particulars of the woman's death, but he didn't think so. The man had been undeniably shot. The dark-haired woman had a righteousness to her. A clarity, too. Anyway, who gave a damn?

He lowered his gun. "Okay. Let's load up the car."

"Can't," the woman said. "They can sense cars. We're leaving on bikes."

"Bikes," he smiled. "Why didn't I think of that."

The man, Raymond, glanced to his wife. "I don't know."

"Me neither." She turned to Walt, fixing him with a crossbow stare. "Who
are
you?"

"My name's Walt. I'm from New York. We have to go."

"So take one of the bikes. We've got a spare."

He waved the pistol. "This thing shoots lasers out of it. That makes me like God from the Third Testament where all He does is kill aliens. Only this God doesn't know Beverly Hills from Bakersfield."

Raymond's mouth parted. "What?"

"You can come with us tonight," the woman said. "Once we're out of here, so are you."

"Agreed." The couple had pretty much everything ready: the bikes, packs of gear, a sort of trailer, hitched behind a purple bike, loaded with water and blankets and more backpacks. The woman belted on a pistol. Walt threw his leg over the bike with the trailer.

She stared him down. "That one's mine."

"Just trying to help."

"Help different."

She kept one eye on him as she gently helped Raymond lift his wounded leg over his bike. The man shut his eyes, breathing hard. Mia smoothed sweat from his brow. Walt smothered his frown. She'd stay with her husband, he saw, even if it meant stopping altogether, dying in the same blast from an offworld weapon.

"Where are we going?" he said.

The woman's attention stayed on Raymond's wavering effort to keep himself balanced. "South."

"Where south?"

"Not-here south."

Raymond hopped from the garage on his good leg, bike wobbling beneath him. "We should have stolen a tricycle."

The woman smiled and walked her bike beside him. Walt trailed, gun in hand. As they crossed the driveway to the street, Raymond glanced back at the house with wistful near-regret. A look like leaving for college for the first time. Like wandering through your back yard and discovering the grave of your first dog.

An explosion kicked up downhill, fierce and close enough for the shock to strike Walt's skin. Raymond inched uphill, one hop at a time. Walt moved beside him and supported his handlebars.

Even so, Raymond had to rest less than half an hour later, dropping off the road into the scrubby grass that fringed the cliffs. Mia gave him water, some crackers. Walt watched the silent road, ready to race off if more than a scout appeared. If worse came to worst, he'd leap off the cliff and see what happened.

The aliens stayed downhill, torching the million-dollar homes with all the patience of incoming tenants who plan to stay for the next ten or twenty million years. Raymond declared himself rested a few minutes later. They made good time then, aided by the road, which first flattened out and then ran downhill. The road angled into a sharp point; at sea's edge, a dark tower rose into the night. A light flickered through a window at its peak, disappearing a second after Walt saw it.

He reached for his weapon. "We could rest here."

"I don't think so," Mia said. "It's a dump."

"And I hear it's haunted," Raymond laughed.

Walt rolled his eyes. Couples. Like their histories were so much more special just because they'd had someone to share them with. They moved on, stopping a quarter mile or so down the road at a railed overlook. Walt could no longer smell smoke, just the salty sea, the sweat griming his clothes, the sweet-sick scent of weeds blooming across forgotten yards. For a while after that, there were no houses at all, just empty slopes and the rolling road. Besides the beach, it was the first open and undeveloped land Walt had seen in days.

Raymond stopped in front of a steepled church, leaning over his handlebars. "I think that's all I've got."

"It's okay," Mia said. "We're far enough for now."

The church's front doors were locked. Walt walked to the neighboring field, picked up a rock, and threw it through the door's window. He swept broken glass with his foot while Mia helped Raymond inside. She returned to help him wheel in the bikes, storing them in a kitchen at the back of the church, then hauled the packs to an upstairs office with a couple of couches. Raymond lay on one, shoes off, scanning his leg with the help of a flashlight.

"How's it look?" Walt said.

Raymond made a face. "Shot."

"Guns will do that." He grabbed a pillow from the other couch and dropped it to the floor with a dusty plop. The blankets from the bike-trailer had the same smell as the couples' house. Wordlessly, Mia spread a blanket on the other couch and sat down to shuck off her shoes.

Raymond watched him make his bed. "You said you're from New York?"

"Yeah."

"How'd you get here?"

Walt pointed to his feet. "Those guys."

Mia narrowed her eyes. "You walked. For thousands of miles."

"If you only do one thing all day long, you can get a surprising amount of that thing done."

She smoothed hair away from her forehead. "Why?"

"Because there is a lot of time in a day."

"Why'd you walk from New York to LA?"

"Oh. To kill myself."

She laughed through her nose. "You didn't do too hot."

"My life has not been an unqualified success."

Her smile melted, replaced by something he couldn't read. Raymond clicked off his flashlight, ruffling into his blankets. Walt was suddenly conscious of the man's breathing, of Mia's, of every shift among their bedding, however minor. He raked up his blankets.

"I'm going to find a couch somewhere."

Mia shifted on her bedding. "I was going to suggest the same thing."

Walt squinted, found the flashlight, and wandered down the hall, boards squeaking under the thin carpet. In another office, he locked the door and curled underneath a desk. He fell asleep before he'd decided where to go next.

In the morning, he climbed the steeple and surveyed the hills with his binoculars. Smoke rose inland. Black specks keened from the north. He climbed down to poke around the church, but found nothing more interesting than a couple of basement vending machines which he broke open for a breakfast of peanut M&Ms and Coke. He'd never really liked Coke. After months without anything like it, it tasted ambrosial.

Footsteps creaked overhead. He found Mia right before the front door.

"Some scout ships out there," he said. "Don't go far."

"I don't need to run a marathon to take a piss."

He handed her a can of Coke when she got back. "You should tow Raymond in that bike trailer. He keeps bouncing his balls around like a bunny with a stroke, your kids will be senile before they're born."

"We're not having kids."

"They can't hear, either," he went on. "The squid-crabs, I mean. The scrabs. No, that's terrible." He licked his thumb, wiped Coke from his lip. "But they can sense motion. So if you're stuck in an elevator with one, fart all you want, just don't try to exit before them."

"They can't smell, either?"

"No, the sound. Possibly they can't smell, but a lot of ocean creatures seem to do nothing
but
smell other things. I expect their sense of smell is at least adequate."

She gave him a look like he'd asserted he could speak to housecats. "Are you being serious?"

"I've killed a few of them," he said, swinging back to things that might be relevant.

"How?"

"Stabbed two through the eyes. They have brains and they don't like being stabbed in them any more than we do. Lasered a third. They have distributed organs or something like it, though. I get the impression it would take a lot of bodily damage to take them down; explosives would work, shotguns probably, too. Swords. I expect swords would be great. I had a sword for a while, but I had to leave it behind when they hunted me down after I killed the first one."

"You know a lot about them." Mia popped her Coke with a pleasant hiss. "Where are you going now?"

"I had been thinking south. I think there are interesting things in the south." He shrugged. "Do you know where the rebels are? The ones the woman who shot your husband was rolling with?"

"She said they lived at a lake outside LA. The only place I know like that is on I-5 on the other side of the mountains."

"There, then."

"You want to fight back."

He shook his head. "I have to."

Mia nodded slowly. "Before last night, we wanted to go there, too. Maybe we could go together. It'd be safer."

"You mean than for you to try to make it with a husband with a hole through his leg."

"And for you to actually find the place instead of winding up in a Mexican whorehouse."

"That doesn't sound so bad."

"These whores have been dead for eight months. After bleeding out of every orifice."

"All right." Walt crumpled his empty soda can and chucked it to the floor. "We're all going to die, you know."

* * *

Two weeks later, Walt sighed down at the lake. Flattened patches of canvas flapped by its shores. Outhouses stood at two corners of the camp, doors hanging open. Though Walt could see wheel ruts all the way from their place on the ridge, there were only three cars, two of them burned.

Raymond eased himself from his bike trailer and leaned against its side. "Think the aliens got them?"

"Don't see any bodies."

Mia tipped her head. "Maybe they took them. Like the prisoners you found in the desert."

"Don't see any signs of explosions, either. Aliens roll in, I don't think these guys would just throw up their hands and say 'Well, you got me.'"

Raymond poked his makeshift crutch at the dirt. "So what do we do now?"

It had been hard for Walt not to get his hopes up the last couple weeks. There sure wasn't much else to do. He'd taken point on their bike-mounted march across the suburbs of Long Beach and Anaheim, but didn't encounter anything more frightening than a starving black labrador. Raymond slept a lot. Mia asked him a lot of questions about his trip and the aliens, which he'd mostly answered except when he didn't feel like it. When Raymond was awake, he readily accepted Walt's orders and asked a lot of questions about Walt's trip, too, though he had the impression it was more about hearing about rescues and escapes than Mia's specific inquiries about where he'd first seen the aliens and what the government had been trying to do in New York before he escaped. He liked them, in a vague way—they clearly loved each other—and hated them for the same reason.

Smoke rose from Los Angeles County. They crossed the mountains to the east. Walt's impatience rose with the smoke. Its particles contained timbers and curtains, roof-tar and bedsheets, but also, no doubt, the aerosolized remains of human beings. Every day it took the three of them to reach the rebels was one more day they wouldn't be helping to kill the beings doing that burning. The ones who'd seen Earth, decided they wanted it, and kicked over the anthills of humanity. The ones whose plague had taken her away.

Up on the ridge above the lake, he couldn't help wondering that if he'd biked by himself, freed of Raymond's trailer and regular need to nap, whether he could have caught the resistance before they slipped away.

"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 stank 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."