He tipped his head to the side. "Guess we don't have anything better to do."
"That's the spirit."
The day was done, but in the interests of getting an early start, she put together what they'd need for the morning trip. Enough food and water for a day. Probably more, given how hard they'd be working. A pistol each—Alden had finally gotten over his post-Hanford thing against guns—and she'd take a rifle, too. They hadn't run into trouble since the man at the hotel, but that could have something to do with the fact they always left the house armed.
In the morning, they took the road into town, carrying nothing but their packs and guns; they'd find a cart at the store. It was a quiet walk. Outside the Ace, she lit a lantern and walked inside the dark building. It smelled musty, with a faint tang of grease. The store had been looted repeatedly, and much of its stock had been knocked to the floor in useless piles, but there was still plenty to be salvaged. There were so many empty homes it was typically easier to move into a new one than to undertake significant repairs on your current one.
Anyway, there were so few people left to take anything.
She could never decide if trips like this were fun or eerie. Both, she supposed. There was something primally satisfying about strolling around a place taking whatever you liked. But it kind of felt like grave robbing, too; she always felt an unidentifiable tension in the air. If she were superstitious, she'd have ascribed it to the ghosts of those who'd been outlasted by their inert creations.
Tristan moved quickly, loading boards and rolls of chain link onto the flatbed cart Alden had brought in from the parking lot. The cart was so rusty and dirty the wheels didn't want to turn. While she found hand saws, construction-grade hammers, and boxes of nails, Alden chipped at the obstructing corrosion with a flathead screwdriver.
All the padlocks were gone, and there were no bins of the type she was looking for, but otherwise, the store had everything they needed. The cart grew heavy. Would take both their strength to push it up the mountain road. They would have to make a second trip, and possibly a third, for additional chain link and sheets of wood for the walls. She'd worry about that once they had the frame in place and a better idea how much more materials they'd need.
Alden frowned at the cart, which smelled like the lubricant he'd found and sprayed on the wheels. "This is going to suck, isn't it?"
Like everything that hadn't been touched since the plague, the lumber and tools had become coated with a greasy patina of filth. Tristan tugged off her gloves and tossed them aside. "Why do you think I wanted us to get up so early?"
"Because you're a tyrant?"
She smiled and got behind the cart. "Help me push, slave."
They rolled it toward the doors, the overloaded bed rumbling so loud they had to shout to hear each other. As they neared the front, Tristan snapped off the lantern and held the door open. Alden muscled the cart outside.
In the dazzling midday sun, a man stood in the parking lot, dressed in ragged jeans and a windbreaker. "What have you got there?"
Slowly, Tristan moved in front of Alden, keeping both eyes on the man's hands. "A lot of none of your business."
"You sure about that?" He watched her back, right hand hanging beside the pistol on his hip. "That looks like city property. And I can't let you take it."
2
He leaned into the oars, fighting the chop, a speck of aluminum on the plain of the sea. Dark outlines of islands rose to all sides. He glanced over his shoulder at the jumble of bridges, dead buildings, and parkland. Kept expecting to see lights—rumor had sure made it sound like Macau had rediscovered honest-to-God civilization: law, electricity, the works—but the only lights were the stars, and even they were having a tough time shining through the soupy humidity.
Two hundred yards from the towers sprouting from the shore, a cross-current tugged the rowboat parallel to the island. Ness sighed and quickened his pace. Could have taken a bridge, but you never knew with those. People liked to guard them, set traps. Like the time in Okinawa. Bridge itself couldn't have been more than a quarter mile, a plain road strung between two arms of sand. Looked as empty as everything else. Yet halfway across, he'd felt the tug of a wire on his foot, and then heard something clicking, and before he knew it he was flinging himself over the railing while fire and shrapnel bloomed overhead like something out of a Vin Diesel movie. As the ocean had risen to meet him, and he considered the best way to land in it without being busted to pieces, he wistfully thought about how much he missed those damn movies.
After that, he'd ruled out bridges on general principle. Thus rowboats and detours and other such nonsense. He paddled against the current, but it was pulling him to the side faster than he could maintain course. He supposed it didn't matter exactly where he landed. He gave up fighting it and focused on moving forward.
Beside him, a gray rope lifted from the water. The tentacle swayed back and forth, then slid over the rowboat's gunwale with a slick rasp. A second tentacle followed, thicker, flared at its end. The first one waved to catch his attention. Ness removed a hand from the oar and gestured back.
"Do you see?" Sebastian signed.
"Nothing," Ness signed back. "So far."
"Be the hero."
Ness chuckled. Without his other limbs and pincers to add nuance to his signs, Sebastian's "speech" got all messed up. There were times Ness could hardly understand him. Course, sometimes it was worse when Sebastian had all his limbs in play. Tentacles snapping this way and that, claws twirling like Cthulhu's halftime show; Ness didn't stand a chance of interpreting it all. Nothing to do but go stark still until Sebastian calmed down enough for Ness to follow again.
"You got it, boss," he replied. The tentacles slipped back below the water.
At last, the current quit shoving him down the shore. He steered away from a line of rocks and toward the soft silt that had piled against the side of a nearby bridge. The boat scraped the dirt and jarred to a stop. Ness hopped out, crouched behind a rock, and scanned the roads and parks with the night vision binoculars that never left his neck. Seeing nothing, he returned to the waterline, plunged his hand into the warm water, and shook it back and forth.
Sebastian emerged in that eerie way of his, at first a few spikes and curled limbs that might conceivably be a ball of kelp or some freaky turtle, then manifesting into a seven-foot alien with an oversized head and a horizontal torso held aloft by a whole mess of legs. He was keeping most of his tentacles and manipulators close to his body to minimize his profile, but that was a bit silly. If a human rounded the corner and bumped into him, there would be no passing him off as anything but what he was. It would be all Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except in reverse, with the humans pointing and screaming while Ness and Sebastian tried in vain to hide.
"Sure this is the right idea?" Ness signed.
Sebastian twitched three tentacles. "Why are we here? This."
"Yeah, but I have the advantage of not looking like a space monster. You could wait at the sub."
The creature's limbs whipped and spun so fast Ness could hardly follow. "Wrong. A gutbrother does not send his gutbrother into the unknown while he hides in the shell."
There was no arguing with a person who said things like that. "Just be careful, okay?"
He moved in a low crouch up the embankment toward the towers fronting the shore. Beneath the coating of dirt, the buildings were pastels, with bizarre, winged balconies. Ness was no expert on China, let alone its architecture, but the churches looked Spanish or some damn thing, triangular faces flanked by squared wings and encrusted with baroque nonsense, the steeples capped with crosses. He led the way, Sebastian clinging tight to the sides of the buildings. As they neared a street, Ness stopped for another look around.
Dead quiet. Quiet like, well, the end of the world. Funny thing: he used to dream of silence like this. Back in Idaho, he'd taken walks at night to pretend the stillness of the hour was a permanent thing. That the whole world was and always wo
uld be as empty as four AM on a Sunday morning. He'd always imagined that's when he would finally be happy, when there was no one left to bother him, and it was just himself and the wind. No worries besides a place to sleep and a meal to eat.
Yet as he watched Macau and saw no movement besides the flap of the palms outside the apartments and hotels, he still wasn't used to how damn quiet it was.
He passed a grid of tennis courts. Starlight gleamed on the glass face of a hyper-modern hotel whose churned-up grounds suggested it hadn't been completed before the Panhandler put the project on hold for good. To his left, the road curved between dense growths of trees, gnarly banyans whose trunks looked like a hundred ropes bundled together.
"Looks like something from your planet," he signed.
Sebastian made a twitch of amusement. What Ness interpreted as amusement, anyway. Language was tough enough, particularly when you were working with a highly dumbed-down and human-adapted version of the alien sign language, meaning neither of them were native speakers.
But interpreting emotions that you weren't certain the other species had to begin with? Ness had gotten pretty good at reading Sebastian, but at times, he was reminded how completely different the two of them were. And Sebastian was far and away the most "human" of the bunch. The dudes back in the sub? Forget it.
The road meandered on. Ness kept his eyes sharp for signs of farming, but the trees were so thick he figured he'd miss it unless he stumbled on a hoe or a bucket. He looked for signs of aliens, too: their ghoulishly organic structures of blue and orange, their silvery gadgets, their vehicles. The farmer on the mainland had claimed she'd heard the unmistakable whine of an alien jets, seen the lights tracking out toward the islands. Pretty flimsy, but whatever. Sebastian had a map taken from the early days of the invasion which claimed there was an airport on the east side of the island, about two miles from their current position. Ness wasn't sure the jet (if it even existed) would be there, however. Those things didn't need runways. You could probably land one safely in the middle of a swamp.
They emerged from the park into upscale highrise residences. In the courtyard between three identical twenty-story towers, a fountain sat idle, a three-tiered system of bowls that looked like it had been teleported in from an Italian piazza. Beside it, three orange plastic buckets sat upside down. A framed screen leaned against them. He gazed up at the surrounding buildings. Halfway up one of the towers, a curtain dropped across the window, swinging side to side.
"See that?" he gestured. He backed up to get the alien in his field of vision, wishing, not for the first time, he had a built-in motion detector like Sebastian's sense-pods.
"I see," Sebastian said.
"You see the face that went with it? That settles it, doesn't it? My people don't make a habit of living places swarming with your people. It's one or the other."
Sebastian faced him straight on, tentacles bent obstinately. "We have only arrived."
"And there's a hundred other islands out here. Hell, for all we know the jet was headed to..." He had intended to say Shreveport, but its very obscurity was the reason they had no sign for it. "Seattle," he gestured instead.
"Airport."
In the apartment window, the curtain shifted again. "We've been spotted. Let's get out of here and argue somewhere else."
"You are impatient like the opposite of rock. The only way to endure is to persist."
Ness grinned and moved from the fountain. "Fine, wise master. Airport first."
They got back on the road and continued east, sticking tight to the shadows of the buildings. It was hot and humid and Ness' shirt stuck to his back, an ongoing irritation and distraction. When it was just him and the crabs, he had gotten used to wearing the bare minimum to carry his weapons and gear, like that internet picture of Sean Connery in the red bikini.
The road swung through a roundabout and shot through more pastel apartments and condos. The median was hopelessly overgrown with grass, ferns, bamboo, and other jungly crap. So far, Macau resembled one of his games of SimCity: elegant, expensive highrises, lots of parks to absorb pollution, and no obvious industry. Its grid left something to be desired, however, angling this way and that. Without Sebastian's map, he would have been hopelessly lost.
They entered more parkland and hooked left down a boulevard fronted by trees on one side and low, stately buildings on the other. Ness had grown up in a college town and knew a university when he saw one. Ahead, he spotted a parking garage next to an expansive building with a weird, arched roof that resembled white bubble wrap.
"Airport," he gestured.
"It resembles the eggs of the —," Sebastian replied, concluding with a sign Ness had never seen before.
"People always made airports look like sculptures. Don't ask me why. The whole point of an airport was to get away from it as fast as possible."
Although there were no obvious signs of danger, or life at all, for that matter, Ness drew his laser, a pistol with a heavy handle and a fat, blunt barrel. Low marine clouds began to push in from the sea. Once he was reasonably sure it was deserted, he followed a narrow street to the tarmac sprawling along the shore. A half mile of calm water stood between it and an artificial strip of land running alongside the island that had once served as the runway.
Trucks and containers scattered the tarmac. So did the wreckage of two jets, crumpled together at an angle, wings busted, fuselages scorched by fire. Ness could see it in his mind: mid-Panhandler, a pilot is ordered back to the terminal. He panics. Veers toward the causeway to the runway, pulling away from the little truck meant to guide the planes around. Slams right into the side of a second jet. Boom, both go up in flames.
Or it had gone down nothing like that. He didn't particularly care how each piece had crumbled. No need to tend to a man's hangnail when his head's vaporized across the wall.
They came around the corner of the parking garage, scanned for movement, then wandered out to see if there were any signs of recent use. Planes rested at the terminals, their cargo holds disemboweled, suitcases and clothing scattered across the pavement. All of it was soiled by years of rain. Ness stopped beneath the wing of a jet and turned in a circle.
A gunshot cracked through the night, neither near nor far. Ness flinched, teeth bared. Sebastian, unable to hear it, reacted to his reaction, shrinking his profile, fitting a lens to one eye with a mini-claw, producing a laser with one of his finer tentacles.
"Gunshot," Ness gestured.
"Where?"
"Hard to say." He gestured to the tarmac. "There's nothing here. Except hostile humans. Time to get off the streets and back in the sub."
"Agree. We move on."
They hustled across the tarmac back to the street, Ness' ears anticipating another shot. He glanced at Sebastian. How the hell had his people survived their gunpowder era when they couldn't hear when they were being shot at? He had half a mind to ask, but talking history with Sebastian was virtually impossible. Too many names, places, events, and concepts with no clear translation. Anyway, now wasn't the time. He had to keep his eye on the streets and the buildings, not his friend's agile limbs.
They padded into an intersection. To the southwest, pillars of blue light shot into the sky.
Sebastian was the first to speak. "We must go see."
"Do we?" Ness signaled back. "They got some lights. Impressive to see someone has pulled themselves out of the Stone Age, but not exactly within the scope of our interests."
"Ness. We go to see the lights. That is why we are here and this is what we must do."
Ness squeezed his eyes shut. The lights were less than a mile away and Sebastian was in one of his excited moods. He knew from experience how far arguing would get him. "One look. If there's no sign of your people, we're on our way. For real this time."
"Yes," Sebastian gestured. "We look."
They took the boulevard to a gigantic roundabout and hung west toward the blue spotlights aimed straight at the clouds. A quarter mile away,
the source revealed itself: the curtain wall of a white hotel with golden trim and bell-shaped peaks, like a Disney castle or an Indian palace. Ahead, a man's laughter rolled across the night. Ness beckoned Sebastian into the trees fringing the road.
"End of the road for you, buddy," Ness signed. "We got humans ahead."
"Ones who want to be seen. We must see why."
"Well, we're not going to be stupid about it. You're going to park yourself in that garage and cover me while I go in for a closer look. Agreed? Or do I have to remind you that you look like something barfed up by Moby-Dick?"
"Though you insult me, we do as you say. We keep you safe."
"Glad we're on the same page," Ness muttered out loud.
Keeping to the unkempt trees, they threaded to the garage and made their way up a dank stairwell that smelled like condensation on concrete. Puddles and rusting cars fought for control of the parking spaces. They got up to the sixth floor and Sebastian installed himself at an opening in the wall with a view of the hotel, whose two wings opened toward them like the wide end of a V. Pools and shops and fountains filled the grounds between its two arms.
Humans, too.
Not by the hundreds, as they must have in the days before the plague. But from his perch in the garage, Ness watched multiple people strolling toward the center of the complex, drawn, bug-like, to the lights. He'd no sooner had this thought than the blue pillars snapped off. People cheered. A handful of small white lights remained scattered in the windows.
"I'll be back," Ness signaled, but without any way to impose an Austrian accent on his hand gestures, nor an audience capable of getting the reference, the whole thing felt hollow.
He jogged down the stairs and toward the hotel. Voices hung in the dense, warm air. The lingering vowels of Chinese were completely foreign to him, yet the very sound of spoken language made him nostalgic.
Torches flapped from walkways. Cages made of wire and bamboo hung from trees and poles, songbirds tweeting away from inside. Beneath a branch laden with ten cages, a smiling old man stood in bright green traditional robes, chattering away in words Ness couldn't understand. The courtyards were a maze of bushes, dark restaurants, and quiet pools, but the lights and noise made it easy to know the way forward.
Cut Off Page 2