She volunteered to help clean their home. Jen grinned and showed her to the broom, dustpan, mop, and bucket. Tristan took care of the basement, spending extra time in the couple’s bedroom, then moved upstairs to the gift shop, careful to sweep all the closets and storerooms as well.
Along the way, Tristan discovered Mikel kept three guns in his bedroom and another nine wrapped in coats in a box in the attic. He’d hidden spare ammo in a chest, the small boxes buried beneath shot glasses printed with tiny pictures of the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff. Tristan waited for the couple to fall asleep, then crept to the attic, where she took a scoped rifle and an automatic pistol. Using a pen light taken from the kitchen, she compared the ammo in the guns’ magazines to what was in the green cardboard boxes—she hadn’t had time to do so earlier, too afraid of being caught—and returned downstairs.
A man waited in the darkness, gun pointed at her head.
“What you got there?” Mikel said.
“Two of your guns,” Tristan said.
“What are you thinking?”
“That the rest of the world isn’t likely to be as nice as Williams.”
“Man, we don’t need all these weapons. You could have just asked.”
Tristan shrugged. “People say yes more when a gun does the asking.”
Mikel sighed. “You got food? Water?”
“I’ve got water from the lake. I was going to go to the reservoir and catch a few fish before dawn.”
“You can’t drink straight out the lake, you’ll shit your brains out. Go wait outside while I kit you out right. And for God’s sake, be quiet. Jen hears you robbing us, you’ll break her heart.”
Tristan went out to the car and got her bag. Mikel crept outside and handed her a pillowcase heavy with small boxes and bottles.
“You know there’s an alien camp down the highway?” she pointed.
“I’ve heard the jets.”
“You heard about any others like it?”
The light of the quarter moon glinted in his eyes. “Who you lose?”
“My brother.” She slung the bags over her shoulders. “I’m sorry. Tell Jen whatever you want.”
She walked to the end of the street and got the bike from under the bushes. Its basket was big enough to hold both her bags, so long as she bungeed them down, but she had to carry the rifle slung on her shoulder. She’d taken a map from the gift shop. It was cartoonish and poorly-scaled, but all she had to do to find Flagstaff was follow the highway.
She biked east into the lukewarm night. She could spend an eternity combing the country and still never find Alden. She needed news. That meant she needed people. People carried news like STDs.
She was still weakened from her bout of exhaustion. It took her two days to bike the 35 miles to Flagstaff. In between, she holed up in a rest stop. From the east, a line of mountains oversaw the city. Flagstaff was smaller than she expected. Smaller than Redding. Snows held to the heights of the two pyramidal peaks beyond the town. She climbed a hill a mile outside the city. The grass had died during the summer, but the outskirts were dotted with gnarly pines that smelled of needles and bad syrup. She scanned the streets through the scope of the rifle, keeping her finger outside the trigger guard.
Extrapolating from Williams’ numbers, Flagstaff could have as many as five hundred survivors. If so, they were doing a damn good job of hiding from each other. Anything green and orderly stood out from the desert like a malleted thumb, but she saw a bare handful of gardens scattered around the town.
It had been one thing to deal with a gaggle of naked, traumatized prisoners and a too-kindly couple. It was another thing entirely to stroll into a strange town demanding answers from total strangers who’d been through unknown trials of their own. Could she connive her way into another household? Someone nice. Popular. A former reverend or elementary school teacher. Sponge them and their connections for knowledge.
But it would take too long to set up, be too risky. Anyway, she wasn’t sure she had the stomach for some elaborate con. It hadn’t been that long ago she was campaigning the streets of Berkeley for gay marriage rights. Some part of her—the same part of her that believe Alden was still alive—continued to believed others deserved respect, honesty, fair treatment.
She channeled her inner Clint Eastwood and walked her bike down the middle of town. When that drew no notice, she picked out a two-story house, checked it for people living and dead, tore a square of cardboard from a box in the garage, and wrote a message in block Sharpie. After thinking for some time on the apocalypse’s equivalent of the saloon, she biked around until she found the Walmart and duct taped her sign to the front doors:
“NEED INFO ON ALIENS, ESP. PRISON CAMPS. WILLING TO BARTER. LEAVE TERMS HERE.”
She returned to her home, which had enough canned fruit and soup to last her a week or better, and killed the rest of the day raiding the neighbors. When she returned to her sign the following afternoon, she found it had been defaced with two names, a drawing of a penis, and a request to meet at 5 PM, no date given.
She turned in a circle, eyeing the parking lot. Several RVs rested at the far end. She cleared them one by one and settled inside the second-largest, prying open the windows to convince a breeze to flush out the sweltering air. She found an unopened bottle of grapefruit juice in the pantry. It was blood-warm but smelled fine. She drank it as she watched the lot.
The sun was still well above the horizon when the man walked to the door and stopped to gaze across the baking asphalt. He lit a cigarette and stepped into the shade of the entry. Tristan examined him through the scope. He wore baggy sports shorts, but despite the heat, a light jacket covered his torso. Probably had a pistol on his hip. She made sure she could draw hers, then popped the door and dropped down the steps.
His eyes locked on her. As she crossed the baking lot, she kept her attention on his right hand, which he used to hold his cigarette. Dry, bitter smoke dispersed across the cars.
She stopped out of arm’s reach. His gaze skipped from her chest to her rifle to her hips. “What’s your name?”
“What’s it matter?”
“All relationships are based on trust. How can you trust when you don’t know who to hold accountable?”
“Tristan.”
“You lying to me, Tristan?”
She squinted against the smoke. He hadn’t shaved in a week and his long hair was held behind his head in a samurai knot. She rolled her eyes. “You’ll have to forgive me. I left my birth certificate back with civilization.”
“Got a boyfriend, Tristan?”
“I left him with my birth certificate. What do you know about the camps?”
He drew on the cigarette. “Do you suck?”
She took a moment to process that was what the man had really said. “Do you?”
“How bad do you want to know about the camps?”
“If you know something, we can deal. I have food.”
“Me too. What I don’t got is a girl. Or enough flexibility to pretend.”
Tristan glanced at a crow pecking at something in the sun-splashed parking lot. “It’s just information. It won’t cost you anything.”
“And all I want for it is five minutes of your time.” He dropped his cigarette, stamped it out, keeping his eyes down. “No one has to know. Nobody’s left to know. It only seems like a lot because we used to treat it like a lot.”
“It’s not on the table. The table has been burnt and left on the side of the highway.”
He nodded, gazing at a planter where crickets chirped in the shadows of the weeds. “Same question as before: how badly do you want it?”
“Enough to be here.”
“Same here. So why don’t we satisfy our wants together?”
She met his eyes. He raised his brows and glanced back at the crickets. Tristan considered her gun. “Would you have talked this way before the plague?”
“What’s it matter?”
“I want to know whether I shoul
d worry about turning into a pathetic little vulture, too.”
He smiled angrily and reached for her face. “Listen, that’s no way—”
Tristan moved with him, pivoting to the left, away from his reach, while thrusting her left palm forward and intercepting his forearm with hers. At the same time, she snapped her right fist into his nose.
Tristan would replay that moment for days, weeks, years. Enough times to know with bone-down clarity she could have ended it then and there. But she was too used to punching walls. Too conditioned by solo one-step sparring, where each strike and block was followed by a pause and a reset to her default stance.
She struck his face. He staggered back. She paused.
He swung for her cheek. She lifted her left to block with her wrist, but she caught him too near the elbow and his fist hinged into her face. She’d diverted half the force, but the remainder stung her, making her hesitate again. He drew his pistol from his hip and leveled his arm.
She grabbed his wrist with her left hand, straining to keep his aim offline, and slammed her right fist into the veiny softness of his inner forearm. The gun flew from his hand and spun over the pavement. His left hand, free and clear, hammered into her head. She dropped to one knee. He hit her again, knocking her down, and dropped his knees onto her chest, driving the air from her lungs. The rifle dug into her back. She groped for her pistol, but he spread his knees apart, pinning the weapon and her left hand to the sidewalk.
He swung his right fist and she slapped it past her ear. His left struck her eye, bouncing her head against the concrete. Stars burst across her sight. His next punch slammed into her mouth, tearing her lip over her teeth. She tasted copper. He hit her again and again. She felt two of her teeth uproot from her jaw, strings of gum-flesh yanking away. She prepared to die.
The man grabbed her throat, pushing his thumbs into her windpipe. The short respite brought Tristan back into the world. She clawed for his eyes, nails scraping furrows of skin from his cheeks. His hold relaxed; he cried out and jerked his head, biting for her fingers. Her right index finger slipped inside his wet cheek. He bit down until his teeth clacked together. White fire exploded from her hand. Her finger was a one-knuckled stump. He spat her severed finger into her face and bore down on her throat.
Her vision grayed. He leaned forward and she jerked her left arm free from his knee. She groped for her pistol, but he spread his knees further, covering the gun. His shorts rode up his hairy thighs. She snaked her hand inside one leg of his shorts and grabbed his testicles.
She twisted, pulled, and squeezed.
He yelled and leaned down, thumbs crushing her throat. She felt something give in her hand, a semihard, gelatinous orb breaking into pieces. His hands disappeared from her neck. He arched his back and screamed, pulling away. She yanked her hand toward herself, grinding her palm, nails slicing his skin. He fell to his side and clamped his hands to his bleeding crotch. She picked up the fallen pistol in her left hand, her right dripping blood. The man had enough survival instinct remaining to push himself up on his hip. She punched the pistol into his mouth, shattering his teeth.
“Suck.”
His eyes went wide. She pulled the trigger. Pink goo fanned the sidewalk. His head yanked back. He slumped, head lolling, blood watering the ground. Tristan jerked her hand, slinging the gun away. She dropped to the ground. Blood dribbled from her face and squirted from her finger. Nausea cramped her guts. She retched, thin streamers of blood mingling with spools of saliva and bile. Pain thundered over her with every heartbeat. Her knucklebone peeked from her finger. The man’s head was a hollowed gourd. She lay on the ground and sobbed.
She couldn’t stay here. She was exposed. Badly hurt. She sat up. The blood left her head in a welcome rush; for a moment, the pain faded. Its return was as sharp as chipped glass. She used her pocketknife to cut away the hem of the man’s shirt, holding the nub of her finger away from her grip, then awkwardly wound the cloth around the stump of her knuckle and clamped down until the pain defeated her. She spat blood from her mouth every few seconds. A red puddle grew beneath the man’s head, seeping through the sidewalk’s cracks, crawling past her fallen teeth.
Tristan hauled herself away, gun in hand. She gargled a mouthful of water, managed to get down a drink. She needed to get off the streets. Get home. She stood and waited for the blood to return to her head. Each step jarred the wounds on her face. She hugged herself, the pistol in her hand digging into her ribs.
She forced herself not to stop. Even when she vomited again. Even when the pain grew so bright the street shrank to a fuzzy gray circle. She was a half block past her house before she realized she’d gone too far. Inside, she bolted the door and lowered herself to the rug in the wood-planked foyer.
She stayed there until the flames of pain burnt down to aching embers. She found a half-full fifth of vodka in the pantry and used it to swab her finger and face. Her cheeks and eyesockets felt swollen, distended. Possibly broken. Would she be ugly? She sobbed again, not so much for her vanity as for being unable to stop herself from having the thought.
She knew she needed to find antibiotics, but she had no strength left in her limbs. She drank a bit of warm Sprite and lowered herself to bed.
She woke in the night, but lacked the strength to do more than drink the rest of her Sprite and a bottle of water and choke down two handfuls of kettle chips. Come morning, she ached just as bad, but she made herself scour the neighborhood door to door, checking medicine cabinets, refusing to let herself see the face in the mirror. Her hopes were low, but she found the right pills within an hour. And more than that. Painkillers. She took two of each and returned to the house.
She stayed indoors for days, stepping out only to go to the bathroom in a corner of the sun-browned yard. As her physical misery ebbed, doubts played in the spaces it left in her head. She should have just done it. It would only have taken five minutes. If she had just been able to get over herself for that long—to block it out, to think of England, to crush her hateful awareness beneath the understanding of the act’s purpose—she could be on her way to find Alden right now.
She wallowed in this for three days, hating herself and her weakness. She tried to drown it with pills and the nightly AM broadcasts of a chatterbox named Josh Jones. But she kept coming back to the doubt, worrying at it like a dog chews its own cuts, heedless of the damage.
A single thought silenced the others. The man hadn’t been entitled to ask. She wasn’t a device for his physical release; she’d done nothing wrong in wanting to find her brother. Anger coursed through her, hotter even than the pain when the man had bitten off her finger, an anger so loud and insistent and consuming she laughed and cried in wrath. She wanted to destroy him all over, to smash his teeth and hollow his head a second time. She lurched from bed, sheets falling from her shoulders, and took up her pistol and her rifle and walked down the streets in broad daylight, hoping someone would step out and try to stop her so she could shoot them dead.
The body was still there in front of the Walmart, but the face was gone, chewed away by dogs. The brains had been lapped from the sidewalk. Brown blood sheeted the ground. Tristan hadn’t known exactly what she meant to do—shoot him, drag him around—but nature had done its own work.
It wasn’t enough to quell her rage. That showed all signs of lasting. Even so, it couldn’t extinct the doubts, which emerged in the small moments of the night to remind her of her low worth and massive guilt, to ask whether it might not be better to be dead. She had no escape from this. She feared she never would.
There was a single silver lining to her time in recovery in the dark and too-hot house. Josh Jones’ nonstop mouth blabbered through the nights, passing on news and rumor from all corners. Aliens laying waste to Chengdu. Gang warfare leaving Milwaukee in flames. And a cryptic message about a resistance movement named the Bear Republic Rebels, a group Tristan worked out was based somewhere outside L.A.
She still hurt, and still hadn’t
met her own gaze in a mirror, but she was ready to move. Her best chance of finding Alden was to find the people dedicated to tracking and fighting the aliens.
She detoured south to Phoenix, meaning to bypass the prison camp in the desert. There, she swapped out her bicycle for a Vespa—the bike, for all its advantages, was limited by her own legpower, and if she got injured along the way, she couldn’t afford to be stranded again in the desert. She strapped the scooter with a red plastic gas jug and a siphon tube and cut straight west for Los Angeles. Her radio killed three sets of batteries along the way. Listening to Jones each night, she gleaned the rebels were encamped somewhere north of the city.
That left an awful lot of ground. But they’d need water. Even with that to narrow it down, it took three weeks of riding through the mountains to find them at Pyramid Lake along I-5.
They weren’t much. Men and women in camo tents. Jeeps and SUVs parked under beige tarps to shield them from sight of passing jets. Two men climbed the switchback trail to meet her, rifles raised. She had to make a fist to stop from going for her gun.
She killed the Vespa and stepped into the gravel, hands empty. “I need to see the man in charge.”
“I bet a lot of people would,” said a tattooed man in his twenties. His gaze skipped around her scarred face, focusing past her shoulder. His voice softened. “What do you want?”
“To kill aliens.”
The older man chuckled. “Leave your weapons with me and I’ll see if she’ll see you.”
“She?” Tristan said.
He raised his brows. “Last I checked.”
“When did you check that?” the tattooed man said.
“Well, never, I suppose. Guess I’ve always just taken her word for it.” He crunched through the gravel to Tristan. Heart beating, she handed over her guns and knives. The old man passed her weapons to his partner. “Mind if I search you?”
“Yes,” Tristan said.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 129