by Platt, Sean
Her head darted back in time to see Raj reach his target, but the man was already falling. Shot through the chest, not the head. The bigger target — less dramatic, but far surer.
Raj couldn’t arrest his momentum. He saw the man crumple but was unable to stop. He managed to hold the fireplace poker away and not spear himself to death, but tripped and fell hard on the pile, striking the grass with a shattering impact that Lila could feel in her bones.
“Lila!”
She turned, suddenly aware that at some point, her tears had fallen. “Daddy!”
Raj was scrabbling like a crab, apparently unhurt, then crawling toward the man’s gun, jarred loose. The other bad guy, the blond, was running behind a small rock wall.
“Get down!”
Meyer pushed Lila behind the truck. The shove was hard; she racked her head on the metal and fought the urge to cry out. A second later, there was a loud pop, and Lila realized she’d narrowly avoided being shot. Her father was behind her, beside her.
“What the hell are you still doing here?”
“Creating a distraction,” she managed to say.
“Jesus Christ, Lila. You almost got yourself killed.”
His chastising voice outweighed his thanks. She felt like a little girl again, called on the carpet for doing something naughty.
“Where is Piper?”
“I … I don’t know.”
Another gunshot. Dirt popped near the truck’s tire.
Another shot, then another. From somewhere else. They both peeked out to see Raj holding the dead man’s gun. To Lila’s knowledge, Raj had never fired a gun. It showed. She watched him pull the trigger a third time, and the recoil looked like it surprised the hell right out of him. There was a ding near the house, very high, as if he’d shot into the roof. He wasn’t remotely close to his target, and after another shot (also into the roof), the blond seemed to realize it.
He stood.
Meyer stood.
“Hey!”
Another shot, very loud, from above. Lila’s ears were ringing, though her father’s shot hadn’t done more than force the man to duck back.
Instead of falling back himself, Meyer ran toward Raj. He tackled him mercilessly, flattening him and seeming to say something before rising — something that, if Lila had to guess, was about Raj’s stupidity and how nobody wanted his death on their hands.
The blond, sensing an opportunity, sprung up again like a jack in the box. But he wasn’t fully upright before something hit him from behind. Lila saw her mother, looking ridiculous with a frying pan in her hands of all cartoonish things. But the pan didn’t do what it did in cartoons, and the man only spun, now aiming at Heather, who ran around the side of the house.
The blond took off after her.
Raj remained dutifully where he was, but Meyer became a blur. He crossed half the distance to the man before the runner could reach the home’s edge. He shouted again, and the man turned, apparently realizing he wasn’t going to make it.
His hands were at his side, the pistol not pointed. There was a split second where Lila thought her father might let him surrender. Instead he took two strong steps forward and, without a second’s hesitation, fired a slug through his chest.
“Get your mother,” he said. “Go!”
The way apparently clear, Lila ran, trying not to look at the dead man or consider how surely her father had dropped him. He was going to give up. But then again, he’d have done the same to his target. The world’s rules had changed, and Meyer Dempsey wasn’t a man to flinch at convictions.
Lila was halfway there when she heard a shout — another male voice, not her father’s. She turned to see the first man — the one who’d gone out onto the porch, just beyond where Raj had been tackled. He seemed to be looking for something even after the shout, but Lila could already see that he was seeking the gun.
The final man had reached it first, after her father had knocked it loose from Raj’s hand. He was holding it now, at Trevor’s head.
Lila felt her heart break. She wanted to run to her little brother, but the man had an arm wrapped around him from behind, holding Trevor like a human shield. The gun was pressed to his temple. The knife he’d been holding was gone. Trevor looked beaten, sad, terrified. His eyes were streaming — something that hurt Lila’s heart most of all.
“Drop it, Meyer!” he yelled.
Lila watched her father. He’d swung around when the man had shouted, and the gun was leveled rock steady in the bandit’s direction. She knew him well enough to know that he was calculating aim and odds. They’d crossed the country to come here, and they hadn’t turned away when they’d found the home under siege. If this man won their encounter, even if Trevor lived, they’d have lost. All in all, Meyer would prefer to win. Lila could see wheels turning, assessing the odds of pulling his trigger and landing a head-shot.
“Do it!” He ducked behind Trevor’s head, probably realizing what Lila had.
Meyer lowered his weapon. Reluctantly, he dropped it to the dirt.
“Kick it toward me! Now! No fucking around!”
Meyer did. The move was almost petulant, like a child. The weapon bounced past the man and Trevor, toward the wrecked truck. Lila watched him stand in the middle of the open, defenseless but seemingly unafraid. He was looking at Trevor rather than the man holding him. It was a look of apology.
Now that Meyer had discarded his weapon, the man’s demeanor changed. The gun moved an inch or more away from Trevor’s skin, whereas the muzzle had been branding his scalp before. His face changed, more desperate than scowling. His voice lowered.
“I didn’t want any of this.”
Meyer said nothing. The man went on, speaking to his mute audience.
“I just wanted a place to stay. I knew you had this house, and that it had a bunker. I didn’t even think you’d come here. Hell, I didn’t think you’d be able to come here. You live in New York, for shit’s sake.”
Lila watched her father’s lips form a pressed line.
“I just needed a place to hide.” He looked at his two dead henchmen in turn: the younger one past the stoop, the blond up near the home’s left side. Lila had watched both men all evening, seeing them go about their human business of walking, speaking, eating, presumably sleeping. Now they were meat. “I never wanted anyone to get hurt.”
“Is that why you kidnapped Heather?”
“Would you rather I’d killed her?”
“You could have sent her away, Garth. But you didn’t want that, did you? Because she’s a loudmouth, and I’ll bet she went on and on about how we were coming to meet her. You couldn’t get into the bunker without me.”
Garth didn’t acknowledge Meyer’s point, but his eyes seemed to.
“You could have just asked me, Garth. You could have come alone, without …” his eyes strayed to the dead man with the shaved head, “ … reinforcements,” he finished. “I would have let you in. There’s room. Plenty of supplies.”
Now Garth looked like he might cry — a strange thing to see on the face of a man holding a gun to a fifteen-year-old boy’s head. He was scared more than Lila had realized. Like her father was surely scared more than he let on. Meyer would do anything to protect his family. Garth, it seemed, was obeying his human impulse to do the same for himself.
“I have to do this,” Garth said. “You won’t let me in now. I can’t leave.” His lips pressed into a frown: You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. Nobody had to like it, his look seemed to say, but that’s how it is.
“Just let him go. Let me have my son.”
He seemed to firm his resolve. “Open the bunker. Just do it.” He twitched his chin toward the open porch door, seeming to indicate where Meyer should go.
“Let him go, Garth.”
Garth’s hand shifted on Trevor’s chest. Then Trevor did something Lila remembered from their shared past, when she’d been six and he’d been four: he took the hand on his chest with b
oth hands, yanked it up to his mouth, and bit it hard.
Garth yelled out. Trevor ducked and ran.
Garth swiveled on the spot, unsure where to point his weapon. There was a strange moment of indecision, and for a second Lila could see him trying to figure out whether to keep aiming at Trevor or take aim at her father.
Before he could do either, another gunshot thundered.
Lila blinked toward the smashed truck, not ten feet from Garth’s collapsing body.
Piper was standing beside it, a pistol in both hands and terror on her face.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Day Six, Morning
Axis Mundi
They left the bodies outside.
Piper didn’t want to think about any of it. She let Meyer do his manly thing, taking over for her and doing what had to be done. After she’d shot Garth, she’d hugged Trevor and Lila, then walked to Meyer and hugged him hardest of all. Meyer took a double brunt of meaning: affection and gratitude as intended in the kids’ hugs, but something else as well. Something Piper couldn’t articulate. Something that was more about her than Meyer. She hadn’t really cared if the kids, under the circumstances, hugged her back. But Meyer needed to, and she wouldn’t leave until he did. Fortunately, he seemed to understand, and pulled her hard to his body.
Then he’d kissed her cheek, and she’d walked back toward the porch, sitting in the kitchen while he’d done something that took about ten minutes. Probably dragging the three dead men into the trees, maybe freeing the horses from their tethers.
He came into the kitchen with Trevor and Lila at his sides, each holding one of his hands like toddlers. Heather brought up the rear, but said nothing sarcastic. She simply came to where Piper sat in her chair, stooped to wrap her arms around her, and said, “Thank you.”
Meyer went to the kitchen sink, overlooking the lake out front, and took a moment to stare out across the moonlit scene. Then he washed his hands of red and brown grime, and said, “Let’s get inside.”
Piper didn’t reply. She just wanted to sleep.
Hours passed.
Day must have dawned outside, but the bunker didn’t have windows, and they could only guess. Meyer locked the bunker door, flipped a few switches that made machines hum and putter behind the concrete walls, and suggested everyone rest. He himself hadn’t slept. Heather and Trevor seemed to have nodded off for a few hours, but despite Meyer’s trying to conceal the tunnel he’d dug through the pantry’s drywall, it hadn’t taken much detective work to find it once they’d woken and found him gone. Piper hadn’t slept either. She’d been far too nervous, too worried about what might come next, and that someone might die. Lila must have been the same; she’d wanted to take her turns faithfully on the binoculars rather than attempting to bed down. Piper couldn’t blame her. It was tiring to surveil the house, but so much worse to simply sit in the quiet darkness with the dots of alien ships overhead, and wait.
So they bedded down. Meyer had done his usual paranoid best, and outfitted their space in the best manner that a rich man’s money could buy. Five bedrooms for six people. If Lila and Trevor had shared a room (blessedly, Lila and Raj didn’t ask to do the same), there would even have been room for Garth.
Piper didn’t think she’d be able to sleep.
But she did.
Piper woke to the sound of a television. How long had it been since she’d watched a TV? Not an Internet stream, but an actual TV on a genuine wall?
It had been a very long time. The last time Piper had watched TV, the world had been a different place. Piper had been a different person. She’d been so much younger. Trevor and Lila had been innocent. She’d lived in a totally different life, caring only about foolish things like yoga and her own entertainment.
How long ago had that been? Ten years?
But no. It had only been a week.
The bunker had been built to mirror the floor plan of an ordinary home, and despite the gray concrete walls (they were due to be painted at some point, but the apocalypse had called first), it almost looked like one. There were attractive track lights mounted to the slab overhead; there was plush carpeting and hardwood in the kitchen; Meyer had furnished the place in an inappropriately lavish (but very Meyer) style.
She entered the living room, trying to think of it as a real living room. She found Heather on the couch, flanked by Trevor and Lila.
Heather gave her a very un-Heather smile. They’d met many times, and even taken a few vacations en masse “for the kids’ sake.” On those family vacations, Heather was supposed to be the hanger-on, but Piper always felt like the odd woman out. They’d got along fine. Heather was hard not to like, once you were used to her always-on personality — and this despite Piper’s suspicion that she was still sleeping with Meyer.
Heather and Meyer shared history that the two of them never could. Piper liked to think she was mature enough to respect different kinds of love for what they were, but suspected she might be pitying herself.
Maybe she wasn’t enough for Meyer. He certainly had much more in common with Heather — and that extended to memories and preferences, not just hobbies. Maybe he needed Heather. Maybe she was just too bedraggled, being raised by a mother who served her husband, to stand up and put an end to it.
Heather held her small, uncharacteristic smile. The room was quiet despite the TV, and they all seemed reluctant to break some sort of a spell that had descended on the room.
They were safe. The fight was over, and they’d reached their destination.
They could bask in that feeling for a while before facing the next thing.
“How are you feeling?” Heather asked.
“Tired.”
“Sleep well?”
Piper hadn’t slept well, but she’d slept some. She nodded.
“Did you sleep at all?”
Heather shrugged, seeming to indicate the children at her sides. They looked sleepy but not asleep. She must have stayed up with them. Like she’d once chased away their nightmares. Piper had never done that. Lila and Trevor had both been grown when she’d entered the picture. There was a moment of jealousy, and then it was gone.
“Not really.”
Piper sighed, then sat. She wanted to say something conclusive to cap their adventure (even “Well, we made it” would do), but her lips betrayed her. She found herself watching the screen, hypnotized by its glow, its soporific, low volume.
Heather was watching the news. The kids, at her sides, looked like zombies — their eyes open and mesmerized.
“How do we get TV down here?” said Piper.
“I don’t know. There was a TV. I turned it on. It worked.”
“Satellite,” Piper guessed. There was a humming behind one of the walls. It might be a heater, but it also might be a generator or three. There might be line power to the house, but there were also solar panels on the roof and huge wind turbines visible farther up the hill. If there was line power and it went out, theirs, down here, never would.
“You know Meyer,” said Heather. “He’s probably got his own satellite up there. And armed guards outside protecting the dish. Did you know that when he started Fable, he was so paranoid about other movie studios stealing his techniques that he had decoy studios built, so it would be harder for spies to know where the real action was taking place?”
Piper shook her head. She hadn’t known that. She thought of how Heather had started the story by saying, You know Meyer. But Piper, hating herself a little, thought instead, YOU do.
She looked over at Heather, sitting between the children Piper had spent the last few years raising. Heather looked tired and rumpled — not at all the polished, primped woman with the outrageous dresses she usually wore in her comedy specials. But Heather dressed down exceedingly well. She looked good casual. Comfortable. Even normal. It was hard to fathom her reality, but oddly enough Piper found her conversation with Heather oddest of all. Heather wasn’t being her usual self. They were talking like old friends. Wh
ich, under different circumstances, they probably would be.
“Have you been watching all night?” Piper said, nodding toward the TV.
“Mostly.”
“Mom made us watch Friends for a while,” said Lila. “Just like you do.”
“It makes us think of our youth,” said Heather, smoothing Lila’s hair. But Piper had been far too young to remember the show. She liked it in the way Heather liked older shows before her time — with a sense of days passed, times she’d missed out on.
“What’s going on?”
“The ships are starting to settle over big cities.”
“‘Settle’?”
Heather nodded. “Just hanging there. Floating. Like in V. Did you ever see V?”
Piper shook her head.
“Lucky. Meyer made me watch it a few times.” She pointed at the screen. “There. Like that.”
Piper put her hand over her mouth, feeling her wide eyes bloom wider. The picture on the screen was surreal. She saw the familiar New York skyline, now circled with what seemed to be an unusual number of helicopters. But smack in the middle, eclipsing the screen’s top half, was the curved bottom of a huge silver sphere. Then the screen changed, an announcer babbling on in words Piper could barely hear. The new shot was from several miles farther back, taken from a helicopter, judging by the high viewpoint and slight jostle. It showed the sphere in its entirety, just hovering above Manhattan like a giant brushed steel bowling ball.
Piper looked at Lila and Trevor, feeling a strange urge to shield their eyes. They shouldn’t have to see this. Then again, it was their new reality. And they’d seen so much worse already.
Heather reached for the tablet on the back of the couch, tapped the screen, and killed the picture.
“I know that look,” Heather said. “It’s how I think I looked a bit ago, when they first started showing footage of the things arriving.”
“They’re not doing anything?”
“Not as far as I’ve heard. Just waiting.”
“For what?”
But Heather could only shake her head.