by Platt, Sean
DAY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Day Five, Morning
Colorado
It was hard to call the people who stole the Land Cruiser bandits. They worked with an efficiency that Meyer couldn’t help but admire: no drama, no bloodshed, no unnecessary emotional entanglement aside from the obvious implied threat.
Their compliance wasn’t a question. There were at least as many of them as there were hicks in Iowa, but this crew was entirely armed. They’d blockaded the road, boxed them in, then waltzed up to the window with weapons capable of killing them all. Maybe the Dempsey family could have fought, but they’d never have fled without a fatality, and Meyer wasn’t willing to spend one. Even Raj.
Once they stepped out of the car, one of the men climbed inside as dispassionately as a mechanic driving a car into the garage for service. The only difference was that instead of driving the Cruiser into a garage, the man drove it around the Jeep and back in the opposite direction. Meyer wondered: did they have a garage? A car carrier?
Meyer shouldered his backpack and nodded silently at his party to do the same. The highwaymen said nothing. They didn’t want food and water. Only the car, and perhaps the fuel in its tank.
After being relieved of their vehicle, the man who’d spoken earlier waved them around the semitrailer and suggested they start walking. Meyer looked back once they were a minute down the road; no one was following. The trailer seemed to be deserted and maybe it was: a one-time carjacking, and then everyone retired. It was a mystery Meyer didn’t suppose he’d ever solve, but it hardly mattered. Yet again, they had no car. Ten minutes later, he insisted on circling back alone to ambush the bandits, intent on recovering their vehicle (or any other), but found them all gone. Only the trailer remained.
They were alone in the mountains. The surrounding resorts all seemed deserted, waiting for a winter ski season that would never come.
The going was tough, and their lungs were unaccustomed to the thin air. After a half hour of walking, Lila sat on a rock by the roadside and stared up at her father, refusing to move like a stubborn dog.
“Come on, Lila.”
“What, Dad? We don’t have a car. It’s not like we can hitch a ride.”
Meyer looked around. They’d left what passed for a main road a while back, beginning the long and winding trek to the compound. He’d picked the spot because it was isolated, hours away on tiny roads, so hidden that even Meyer sometimes got lost trying to reach it when checking construction.
“We can walk.”
“How far is it?”
Meyer shrugged. He thought he knew exactly how far it was, but telling Lila wouldn’t do anyone any good. If anything, it would make the others refuse to budge.
“How far, Dad?” she repeated.
“Considering how far we’ve come? We’re almost there.”
“How about if you don’t consider how far we’ve come? Then how far is it? You know, in real-person miles. The way someone normal would measure it.”
“I’m not sure. But it’s that way.” He pointed.
Lila stared at him. He had a strange urge to grab her arm and drag.
“It’s outside Vail. This is basically Vail.”
“How far outside?”
“Lila, get up.”
Instead of Lila standing, Raj sat. Trevor followed a second behind. Piper, standing across from him, looked very much like she wanted to do the same, but this seemed to be a show of support. She could collapse later. Right now she had to stand with her obsessive husband against the will of her reasonable stepchildren who were, despite their father’s wishes, talking sense.
“We only have a day.” Meyer looked up. It had to be 9 a.m. or later. He looked over at Piper. “Right? Just a day still?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Did you listen to the radio last night, while I was asleep?”
“A bit. As much as I could stand, anyway.”
“And?”
She’d seemed so bright when he’d woken. Now she seemed exhausted, cranky like a freshly waking teenager. “And what, Meyer?”
“Well, what are they saying?”
“Riots, looting, people doing stupid shit like stealing cars.” She looked back toward the ambush. “Although I’m not sure if the stupid shit is them taking the car, or us taking it a few days earlier.”
Lila had clapped her hand over her mouth but was smiling broadly behind it. Piper never swore unless she was being playful in bed. To Lila, right now, at this hideous moment, hearing Piper break her usual unspoken rule to say “shit” (twice) was a bizarre kind of Christmas.
“What about the ships?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Meyer. It’s hard to tell the real reports from the crazy ones. Remember what your dad was saying about 9/11? How it got all ‘foggy’ and nobody knew what terrible things were actually happening and what wasn’t true? That’s the whole world, right now.”
Meyer considered pushing, but decided against it. He’d made his living negotiating one thing or another, and a forgotten key to success was knowing when not to play the game. He wouldn’t make Piper say what he wanted, but she hadn’t denied it, either. So they had a day, maybe thirty-six hours. They could walk it in that time if they’d toughen up.
“Look,” he said. “It’s stupid to give up now. I know you’re tired. I’m tired too. But we have to do it. We can rest at the house.”
Raj lay back on the gravel. “Let’s rest here.”
Lila lay back beside him, then rolled to side-spoon him. “I agree.”
“Get up, Lila.”
Now Piper was sitting. She didn’t lie back, but she perched on the guardrail. Why not? Nobody would be traveling these roads anytime soon. They could sleep in the middle of the road if they wanted to.
“Get up, Lila,” he repeated.
“I’m tired, Dad. And I feel like I’m going to throw up again. Maybe you should have a bit of mercy, considering … ”
“Considering what?”
She rolled her eyes. “Nothing.”
“We have to go,” he said. “We can rest for a while, but then we have to walk. A bit at a time, but we have to keep moving.”
“Let’s just find a nice barn to shack in,” said Piper. “Like I suggested back in Pennsylvania.”
Meyer straightened. Then he took Piper by the hand and practically picked her upright. Something in his manner must have registered with Trevor, because he stood too. Even Lila and Raj sat up, but showed no sign — yet — of coming along.
“What?” said Piper.
“You gave me an idea.”
“About a barn. So we can do that. Shelter in a barn. Maybe steal some guy’s car later on so that we can make a run.”
“Not the barn.” Meyer shook his head. “What’s in the barn.”
“A tractor.” Lila looked at Raj. “I am not driving down the road on a tractor.”
“Horses,” Meyer replied.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Day Five, Afternoon
Colorado
Lila didn’t know that Colorado — this part, anyway — was horse country. But it clearly was, and once they started walking and knew what they were looking for, they found a farm almost immediately. But there were people visible, milling in the house and walking back and forth to the barns. For a moment as they walked past on their way to the next one (not so close as to be obvious), Lila thought of who those people might be and what they might be thinking. Were they a family, like the Dempseys? Were they highwaymen who’d left the road to occupy a ranch? From a distance, it was impossible to tell. Good men and bad men looked the same from the road, especially considering how thin the line between them had become.
For hours at a time, Lila forgot her pregnancy. It was still important (vital, really), but so many more important things had surfaced in the past four days. There were the alien ships; there was the riot and fear of death; there were two ambushes resulting in one grand theft auto. Only dur
ing the slow times — like now, as they walked — did she stop to be a seventeen-year-old girl again. There would come a time when Lila grew large and another time when she’d have to talk to her father about what had happened. It hurt to think of; she’d always been such a daddy’s girl. Admitting to a baby would be admitting, in an irrevocable way, that she was no longer her father’s. She’d had at least one deeper relationship with a man her age. And she’d soon be a full-grown woman in nature’s most obvious way.
Thinking about the baby made Lila think of her mother. Mom had, despite her caustic comedy act and her reputation for outrageousness, been an excellent mother. She’d only given Meyer custody because his life (with far less travel and fewer late nights) was more stable. It had crushed her to give them up, and she still doted on Lila and Trevor whenever she saw them. She stopped being irreverent Heather Hawthorne and became Mom again.
Lila watched the first horse farm vanish behind a rise. Who were those people? Did they own the ranch and had simply never left? Was this all business as usual for them? Were they tending to chores as if the world wasn’t about to change forever — feeding horses who had no idea, no fear that Earth might be seeing its final days? Supposedly, animals could sense threats like storms and fires well before they were upon them. There was a hardwired, inborn fear that told them when running was worthwhile. What would it mean if, when they eventually found some horses, the animals were as calm as those people appeared from a distance? Would it mean there was nothing to fret about after all, and that their human fear of change was manufacturing the panic — all this chaos and lawlessness?
What did it mean, when they found those horses, that they themselves would resort to theft … again?
It was okay to commit crimes if it was for your own good, it seemed.
It was okay to steal if it meant getting away from people who wanted to steal from you.
It was okay to beat people up and make your own rules if it would get you to your hole in the ground, where you could hide while everyone else either died or tore themselves apart.
Maybe the Dempseys weren’t anything special. Maybe they were just five average people, marching toward judgment like all the rest.
Ten minutes later, they came to a large horse farm just as nice as the first. It was either deserted, or the owners were hiding. Either way, the horses whinnied loudly when they entered, clearly hungry, their stalls overfull of manure and in need of cleaning. Meyer and Piper strapped saddles on five of the horses while Lila closed an access gate and opened the seven remaining stalls to let the horses run free in a large indoor arena. Then she opened a gate at the other end, giving the animals access to stacked hay and a few unopened piles of feedbags in a storage area.
Trevor was behind her, watching with ambivalence. “I think horses just eat and eat until they explode if you don’t ration their food.”
“You’re thinking of goldfish,” she said.
“So you’re saying they’ll stop when they’re full.”
Lila shrugged. There was only so much she could do. If nobody had come back, they’d have starved in their stalls. If nobody came back even now, they’d run out of food and starve in the arena. Maybe they’d eat themselves to death. Maybe she was choosing their doom, same as she was choosing her own.
Raj closed the gate to the storage area, and proceeded to toss several hay bales inside, followed by three cracked-open bags of feed. Then he vaulted the gate, walked to the arena’s far end, and opened the outside door. They were in the mountains, a wild area, with barely any traffic. Horses were animals. They’d adapt.
“Split the difference,” he said.
Time passed differently once they were riding. Lila hadn’t fully realized her exhaustion until she was back to traveling without using her legs.
Something in her mind had shut off a lot of what was happening in her body — perhaps trying to keep her feet moving despite pain and fear and fatigue, obeying a primitive sense of self-preservation. But now that her only job was to balance atop the horse (she didn’t even have to think or steer; her father was in the lead, and the others simply followed), Lila found her mind had gone back to wandering. She wondered if she was in shock.
What was shock like? Yet another condition she couldn’t look up. When she felt dizzy thinking of their destination, was that morning sickness, shock, or cowardice? Did Trevor and Raj feel the same? Did Piper?
A few days was all it had taken to affect a change in Piper. She was still Lila’s quirky, vaguely New-Age stepmother. She was still cool; she still shared a surprising amount of Lila’s tastes in music — and of course in clothing, seeing as she was the brain behind Quirky Q. Lila’s friends had been over the moon when Lila’s father had married Piper Fucking Dempsey — but to Lila, it had all been so obvious. Yes, Piper was amazing. But her father had married her when she’d been Piper Fucking Quincy, a nobody known by no one. Piper Quincy had put the Q in Quirky Q, but the world only knew her after she’d married the mogul who funded her business to make it what it was now. To put the Fucking in Piper Fucking Dempsey, as it were.
But now, in addition to being all those cool things — more an older sister than a mother figure — Piper had grown an edge. She rode beside Lila’s father rather than behind him as she would have in the past. She’d taken the driver’s seat several times when they’d still had a car — not just when Meyer needed rest, but sometimes because she liked her hands on the wheel.
“Hey,” said Raj.
He’d ridden up alongside her, same as Piper had ridden up to her father. She looked over, trying to see him anew. He’d proven himself during this trip, even though he technically shouldn’t even be on it. He’d been forced into the family as if by a crowbar, and seemed to fit. He’d been noble and stupid enough to run after the woman in trouble when the freeway riot began, then smart enough to cut his losses and drag Lila back out. He’d handled the car salesman with the gun. He’d stood up to her father, even though he’d lost. She could hardly count that against him. Everyone lost to Meyer Dempsey.
“Hey.”
“How are you? I mean … ” He looked ahead, past Trevor, to the adults at the front of their five-horse caravan on the road’s side. He patted his own stomach and lowered his voice. “You know. With the … ?”
She forced a smile. “I feel okay. For now.”
“Not sick?”
Lila looked up at the bright-blue sky, hemmed in by hills and trees. Being up in these mountains was almost like being in a valley, but the feeling was secure rather than claustrophobic. It was almost possible to believe they might escape the spheres. The sun was high though the air held a chill.
“Only in the mornings. I don’t feel like throwing up once it gets past noon, like clockwork.” She pointed at the high sun, establishing the time without digging for her phone.
“You didn’t seem like you wanted to throw up this morning.”
“I barfed in one of the stalls.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t know if that’s morning sickness. I might just be convinced it should be morning sickness.”
“How would that work?”
Lila let it go. Her own mind could manufacture all sorts of illnesses if it thought it was supposed to, but Raj was cut and dry. He’d make a good doctor. Maybe even a good dad.
“Never mind.”
“Piper said she heard on the news that the ships are slowing down.”
Lila looked over. Why did he have to say that? She’d managed to feel human and normal for a few minutes. They had a sunny day with long shadows and crisp mountain air. It was almost possible to imagine all the skiers arriving a few months from now, parking their expensive vehicles and walking toward lodges with their overpriced skis. That was a world where people had nothing better to do than reach the top of a big hill and slide back down on boards. A world that she suspected might never return.
Lila recovered anyway. Denial wouldn’t help. If things were coming, she might as well forc
e herself to get used to it.
“I thought they were already slowing down.”
“Well, sure. But now they’re, you know, braking.”
“Like breaking into pieces?”
“No. Braking. Like, ‘whoa.’” He pulled the reins back to demonstrate, and the horse dutifully stopped. Lila laughed as he nudged his mount’s sides to catch up.
“What does that mean?”
“That they don’t want to ram us.”
She’d forgotten the idea that the ships might simply ram Earth to begin with. Raj’s bringing up the threat then dismissing it immediately didn’t feel like good news. It felt like a wash.
Lila looked up, wondering how long it would be before people could see the ships with the naked eye. Maybe some people already could. The thought gave her a chill, but she stuffed it down.
“Oh. Well, that’s good.”
“Sure.” Silence, then, “What do you think they want?”
Lila shrugged, trying to hide her dread.
“What do you think they’re like?” he said.
Lila didn’t like the images that brought up, either. She wondered at herself, watching her own reactions as if from the outside. Had she been thinking they might be giant marbles that would show up, hang out, then leave without doing anything? Because based on her reactions to Raj’s perfectly sensible inquiries, it sure seemed she had.
“I have no idea.” She decided to rip off the Band-Aid. “I just hope they’re not those gray things with the giant, black, almond-shaped eyes.”
Raj studied Lila.
“You have big, brown, almond-shaped eyes. Maybe they’ll like you.”
Lila wondered if she should be insulted, but he clearly meant it as a cutesy compliment. And besides, it was true. She did have big, brown, almond-shaped eyes.
“Maybe.”
“I get a little ashy sometimes,” he said. “Do you think our baby might be able to pass for one of them, if they take over the planet and enslave us all?”