“Trying to catch a tan for the girls?” she shouted over the wind and the engine.
He turned, blushing. “You should try it. It feels great.”
“I am not taking off my shirt.”
Alden blushed harder. “I mean, taste the wind.”
Tristan laughed. “Is that what you call that?”
“It tastes different wherever you go. At Hanford, it’s dusty. At Redding, it’s gummy. Here, it’s salty.”
She stood from her chair, wind catching her hair. She glanced at the sails to ensure they remained firmly furled—she wasn’t going to let them out them until they were clear of the coast—then took a deep breath. It tasted salty and cool, ancient yet ceaseless. She breathed again and the sun was warm on her face.
“Enough fun,” she grinned. She dropped back into her seat. “This is your captain speaking.”
Alden straightened. “Sir.”
The shadow of the bridge swallowed them up. The motor purred through the hull. “Prepare to engage sails. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us. Estimated travel time: who the hell knows.”
She throttled forward. The boat smashed through the waves. Gulls circled, cawed, dipped their slender white wings. The ocean spread to the curves of the world.
* * *
The engines went on whispering, but he could feel the sub slowing. Had it already been a day? He had no watch. Time was as fluid and unseen as the ocean beyond the windowless hull.
Sebastian appeared in the oval doorway. The ship lurched, beginning its ascent, and the alien braced three tentacles in the frameless portal.
“Still coming?” it signed.
Ness nodded. “Oil?”
Sebastian shook its bulbous head. “Friends taken. We take back.”
“From humans?” Ness gestured.
“Yes. Problem?”
“No problem.” Ness rolled from his alcove and stood on the rubbery floor.
Sebastian handed him one of the blunt black pistols. “J-A-P-A-N,” it signed, letter by letter. “Been?”
“No.”
“New things good.” Sebastian’s two sense-tentacles bobbed back and forth, a gesture of pleased anticipation. “Come.”
Ness followed it through the humid tunnel. Another alien emerged behind them. Ness climbed behind Sebastian up the steep ramp. He could smell the brackish sea. Sebastian unzipped the wall and stepped out from the tower onto the sub’s top deck. A beautiful mountain waited on the horizon, perfectly proportioned, crowned by heavy layers of snow painted pink by the last gasps of sunlight.
Sebastian still hadn’t called him by the five-part tip-twitch that signed for “gutbrother.” Ness knew it would come in time.
He checked his gun and jogged after Sebastian to the pier.
* * *
“Tristan!”
She stirred with a gasp. Her sweat stuck her to the sheet. The cabin was humid and hot, but she’d been dreaming about the man at the Walmart again, too. Each time she struck him, her fist had sunk into his skin as harmlessly as if he were made of dense feathers. However hard she punched him, he kept coming, walking nearer and nearer, lifting and lifting and lifting his gun.
“Tristan!”
“I’m coming.” She pulled on her shirt and tromped upstairs. The sails snapped lightly, nicely trimmed. Waves beat against the hull. Alden stood at the front and pointed ahead, his grin as bright as the tropic sun.
A hazy green lump swelled on the horizon.
They’d been on the water so long the sand felt wrong. They’d weathered two storms. Lost one jib sail (she’d brought two spares). Seen sharks. Whales. Once, they thought they’d seen another boat, its sail a bright spot miles to the south, but it had disappeared before they could be sure.
Hawaii hadn’t escaped the Panhandler either. She hadn’t expected otherwise. She hadn’t expected to step off the boat into a ready-made paradise, to be handed a drink with an umbrella by a handsome yet shy poolboy, who would then lead them to their upstairs suite. She knew they’d have to work for it. That it might take years of labor to attain a life of comfort. But it would be best here. Away from the jackals of Redding, free from the slavery of the tick-king of Better San Diego, separate even from the well-meaning anthill at Hanford—here was where they could raise their own home.
She stood in the sun, shorts dripping seawater. Waves tumbled up the beaches. Palms hissed in the constant wind.
“Well?” Tristan said. “Where do you want to set up camp?”
“The beach.” Alden glanced over his tanned, freckled shoulder. “Can we?”
“Man, we can do whatever we want.” Someone cried inland. Tristan hunched down, reaching for her pistol, then laughed at herself. It was just a bird, uncannily human. “Just keep your eyes open.”
The breakers rolled in one after another.
* * *
The man sat atop Chichen Itza and surveyed his jungle. Very green. Very jungly. Hot as all hell. That, too, was normal. He sometimes wondered why he’d stopped here. His reason had not been particularly wise or tactical; the monument had simply been too cool to pass by without stopping. He’d climbed up its outside, then found it had a staircase inside it, too, a stifling, steamy, terrifyingly steep rise that led to a blank wall. After he got out, he climbed back to the top to consider the jungle and shake off his claustrophobia.
Then he’d just sort of stayed. Even after the small people emerged to drive him away. (It had taken weeks to reach a detente with them.) Even after he discovered there were no rivers or proper streams in the peninsula, and that when it wasn’t raining, he had to hoist buckets of water from foul-smelling and horrifyingly enormous sinkholes. He hadn’t traveled on even after it turned out that it was never really not hot in this place.
Because seriously, the monument was just that cool.
He sat on the top step, shaded by the overhang, running his palms over the rough stone. He should think about going to the shore for a few days. Cool off. Catch and dry some fish. Grab some citrus. Ward off the ol’ scurvy. The roads were clear; he could bike the twenty miles by sunset, easy. But it was so hot. He could wait till dusk, at least.
He napped a while. As he woke to scan the jungle and ensure the trees were in the right places, motion caught his eye. A woman strode across the grassy field. Straight for the pyramid he was enthroned upon. Too tall to be one of the locals. Not quite brown enough, either, though she had his rich tan beat. He got his laser out from under the stone bench and rested it on his knee.
The steps were comically steep. There were 91 of them on each of its four sides and every one felt like the one that would send you tumbling to a snapped neck. She steadied herself with her hands, breathing hard, sweat beading her lineless face. She was pretty. He doubted he was. As she climbed, she looked up several times, as if to check if he were still there.
Four steps below the flat top, she stopped, knelt, and shielded her eyes with the blade of her hand. “Are you the man who drove the enemy’s ship into the sea?”
“Nope,” he said.
“That is funny,” she said. “Because yes, you are.”
Walt swore and scowled down at the languid ball court. He’d thrown a tennis ball around there once before almost passing out from heat exhaustion. Impossible to get it through the stone hoops.
“Who told you?” he said. “The Maya?”
“Yes.”
That information—conveyed largely through gestures, partly by bastardized Spanish—was what had convinced them to let him stay in the first place. He regretted it with sudden intensity.
“What do you want?”
“They’re not gone, you know,” said the woman. “The invaders.”
“So what? They’re grounded, aren’t they? Sent to their room without dinner.”
Her gaze didn’t falter. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He gestured at the sky. “Their ship’s gone. Most all the little ones, too. A few more years, all we’ll have left is their big
weird skulls.”
She shook her head. Sweat pattered to the hot stone. “They’re breeding. I need your help.”
“You don’t need my help,” he snorted. “Anyone can shoot them. Anyway, I’m retired.”
She climbed higher, reaching for his hand. “Please, sir.”
“Come on. This isn’t Indiana Jones. I’m not traipsing off into the jungle to save a village from the evil—”
“No village. Unless Los Angeles has shrunk considerably since I last saw it.”
“You’re American? You came all this way?”
She nodded. “And I need help.”
“Oh.” He scuffed his shoe, suddenly embarrassed by his delusions of being approached as a mysterious foreign king atop his lofty ziggurat. “Well, I’m a nice guy, once you get to know me. I’m not going to send you back without listening to what you came all this way to say.”
She smiled. The jungle moved as it should. The sun beat down from the sky. She began her story.
Walt swore.
THE END
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About Edward W. Robertson:
Ed writes science fiction and fantasy, particularly where stuff gets blown up. In addition to the post-apocalyptic Breakers series, he’s the author of the epic fantasy trilogy The Cycle of Arawn. He lives in Los Angeles with a small domestic menagerie and is pretty sure that at least one of the dogs outranks him.”
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Get Breakers 1-3 on Amazon US or Amazon UK
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All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Bitter Harvest (Season of the Harvest #2)
Origins (The Wasteland Chronicles #2)
Infected (Slow Burn #2)
The Shock (After #1)
The Onset (Contamination #1)
Melt Down (Breakers #2)
Table of Contents
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 145