Cut Off

by Robertson, Edward W.

  "And if it's a non-standard standard?"

  Sebastian squirmed a tentacle in a shrug. "Then this is why lasers."

  Five turned the sub to make a quick sweep around the inhabited side of the island, then withdrew them to the open ocean to hide until nightfall. Sebastian had a conversation with the Collective before retiring to the galley to study maps on his pad and compile a plan. Knowing little of the aliens' structures, let alone the growth-patterns they adhered to, Ness had little to offer. He was always eager to learn more about them, though, so he talked it through with Sebastian anyway, doing his best to provide a sounding board.

  The plan that emerged was not that complex. Swim up to the island, tiptoe to one of the towers, head straight for the information/control/ops room, steal their data, and swim back to the sub to read the contents. The one foreseeable wrinkle was that the ops room might be in use—the Swimmers appeared to run flights nearly every night, after all—but their business seemed to conclude no later than two AM, leaving Ness and Sebastian with a four-hour window to do their thing before dawn. Worst case scenario, Sebastian could make use of one of his prized possessions: an alien security device built to KO his own people.

  They decided to move at four AM. Ness headed to his bunk to try to catch a quick nap. Once night showed up, so did a jet. A few minutes later, it took off from the island, climbing straight up to a height of fifty feet. There, it boomed north, skimming above the water.

  As expected, it was the last flight of the night. Ness, Sebastian, and Five watched the feeds all night and saw no other movement. Not that that meant much. The jungle started after about six feet of sand and didn't quit until it hit the opposite shore. You could hide a Super Bowl in there and no one would notice.

  To keep their profile as low as possible, they intended to exit the sub's airlock rather than its tower. Ness and Sebastian geared up, which in Ness' case meant stripping down to nothing but his pack, his water shoes, and a pair of black briefs, and entered the chamber. It flooded with warm sea water. Outer doors whirred, disgorging them into the ocean. This always disoriented Ness, but all he had to do was follow the trail of bubbles spewed by Sebastian's spinning tentacles.

  Ness surfaced. The air was the same temperature as the water. Salt dribbled down the back of his throat. Sebastian propelled himself forward, submerged except for a single tentacle to help Ness follow. They were hundreds of yards from the island and Ness settled into a medium-paced crawl, careful not to kick too deep and bang his shin on an arm of the reef.

  He had to fight his way through a few unusual currents stirred up by the arrangement of the bay and the islands within it, yet soon found his feet striking sand. Ahead, Sebastian slouched through the shallow water, waited for Ness, then scuttled along the thin band of sand beside the forest. Ness jogged after him, sand clumping on his wet shoes. The air smelled like damp leaves, foreign pollen, and drying marine life. As they came nearer to the compound, Sebastian swerved into the trees. Ness didn't see how Sebastian intended to get through the undergrowth when his own body, a-jumble with limbs, so closely resembled the forest itself, but Sebastian found a trail and followed it along the up-and-down ground. Ness kept such a close watch for upthrust rocks and roots that he nearly plowed right into the base of the tower.

  The building's skin was pebbly and orange and smelled like the inside of a snail shell. Sebastian held up his sensory tentacles for several seconds, then went to work on the pad beside the door. Ness kept an eye on the forest. Not that he could see a damn thing. He turned to his ears for help instead. A heck of a lot of bugs were announcing their desire to have sex with each other, but other than that, it was fairly quiet, as jungles went.

  The door slurped open. Ness whirled. Sebastian was already moving inside, brandishing his laser and stunner. He beckoned Ness after him. Ness had been inside such buildings on multiple occasions, and every one of them reminded him of one thing: the afternoon Shawn had gotten drunk, which wasn't noteworthy in itself, and had then gone to the pond to catch frogs, which was more unusual. Shawn had brought home a creel full of them, then insisted on cooking them on the spot.

  To Ness' taste, the result wasn't exactly haute cuisine. More like if you stapled a chicken to a salmon and left them behind the fridge for a few days. Worse yet, the trailer's kitchen lingered with the smell for days. Ultimately, their mom had had to fry a mess of onions, garlic, shrimp, and peanuts just to be rid of the smell. It had been ten years since then, maybe twelve, but every time Ness walked into one of these structures, he smelled Shawn's frog casserole.

  The bottom of the tower was an open lobby. A ramp spiraled up the outside wall, leading to any number of nooks, alcoves, and rooms. Ness followed Sebastian up it, his damp soles squeaking on the rubbery surface. He almost bent to pull them off, then remembered they had no way to hear him.

  In front of every alcove, Sebastian paused to ensure it was vacant before moving on. The inner wall sported any number of closed doors, but Sebastian showed zero interest in these. Near the top, the ramp led to an upper platform. Sebastian told Ness to wait, then finished the climb alone.

  In the room above, pointed feet thumped the spongy ground. There was a brief tussle, a large thump, then silence. Sebastian appeared at the top of the ramp, balled the end of his tentacle, and stuck up the tip.

  Ness joined him on the top floor. An alien sprawled on the floor, unconscious. Work stations, displays, pads, and alien computers illuminated the space with a dozen points of soft light. Windows overlooked the night. As Sebastian set to work on the hardware, hooking it up to his personal pad, Ness kept his eyes and ears on the ramp.

  Sebastian worked quickly and with no apparent frustration or setbacks. After a few minutes, he became animated; Ness glanced over, but Sebastian was merely wrapping things up, setting equipment back where he'd found it. As Ness turned back to the window, a light outside it caught his eye. He frowned and moved across the room for a better look.

  Sebastian tapped up beside him and nudged him on the shoulder. Once he had Ness' attention, he signed, "Okay ready to leave."

  "We can't go," Ness said.

  Sebastian held up his pad and waggled it for emphasis. "Have data. We go now."

  "It's not about that. It's this place—it's a slave camp."

  13

  Alden eyed the skull on the post. It bore no hair or skin. He shuffled his feet. "Suppose he forgot to declare his foreign fruit?"

  Tristan rubbed her eyes. "I'm so tired it's like I'm looking in a mirror. How about we get some sleep and see how things look in the morning?"

  "I think daylight's only going to make it look more like a human skull." He took a step back. "But I'm beat, too."

  They found a patch of level ground between the road and the steep hill. The dirt was damp and Tristan wished she'd thought to pack a tarp. She was soon asleep anyway. Day came far too soon, but at least the mountain blocked the harshness of direct sunlight.

  Once they ate and walked some of the stiffness from their muscles, they returned to the broken bridge. The crevasse it spanned wasn't thirty feet wide.

  "We can climb across easy enough," Tristan said. "Question is, do we want to?"

  "Travel into cannibal territory? Sounds awesome."

  She reached up and lifted the skull from the post, turning it in her hand. "No sign of injury. Maybe this guy was just a plague victim."

  Alden wrinkled his nose. "Yeah, or they stabbed him in the heart. They took out the bridge. I count that as pretty serious."

  "As soon as the Panhandler got bad, I would have knocked out the bridges, too. I say we take a look. The jungle's huge. There's no way all of it's been claimed."

  "What about those?" He pointed down the valley to the houses in the meadow overlooking the sea.

  "Way too open." She peered down the decline, looking for a path to the bottom. "Not counting the aliens and their dog decoys, we got to this point with zero trouble. I don't want to set up anywhere people can hike to so easily."


  They helped each other down the slope, grabbing onto bamboo and outthrust red rocks for support. A stream trickled through the bottom of the gorge and they paused to filter some into their jugs before climbing up the other side. Bamboo grew in thirty-foot curtains from the hills. Orange flowers hung from the trees lining the road. They crested a rise and looked out on the bright blue of the ocean. The road straightened and declined into the jungle. The mass of orange-flowering trees was shunted aside by towering trunks. Alden lifted his nose, then jogged down the road.

  "Holy shit," he called, stopping in front of one of the eighty-foot trees. "Are these...alien?"

  Tristan broke into a run, unholstering her pistol. Alden tipped back his head, mouth hanging open. She slowed to a walk, gun dangling by her side, and joined him in staring. The tree's smooth bark was striped by vibrant pastel blues, greens, oranges, yellows, and pinks, as if it had been finger-painted by a child at Easter. Others like it thrust from along the road. Past them, the ground fell away at a brutal angle. Tristan approached cautiously, putting away her gun.

  "I have no idea," she said. "Which is completely crazy."

  They halted for a few minutes, sipping water, gazing up at the multicolored trees. Tristan decided they were Earth-native—they had branches, leaves, roots, and must have taken years and years to grow—yet that made them more wonderful, not less. The last few weeks had been nothing but tension and stress. Discovering the aliens in the caldera. Tangling with the Guardians. Being driven from their home by people, then bombed and hunted by aliens. This was the first time she'd felt peaceful in weeks and she felt compelled to linger among the Alice in Wonderland trees until it faded.

  But they weren't tourists. They were refugees in potentially hostile territory. She promised herself she would come back and continued down the highway, which squiggled madly around ravines, streams, and waterfalls. Soon, they were forced to stop again: not because the road was cracked or the bridge was out, but because the waterfall across from them was a hundred feet high if it was a foot, dashing down a black cliff into a broad pool. Mist hung in the air, cooling it.

  Alden grinned at her. "What if we built a shack right here? I always wanted a pool."

  "A little exposed," Tristan said. "Could put it back in the trees. But I don't think we should stop yet. Should scout to the end of the jungle and make sure we're not right next to a settlement—human or alien."

  Further on, they ran into a gathering of a dozen houses and collected avocados from a tree whose branches groaned with hundreds of fruit. As with the rest of the trip, the houses appeared long vacant, and probably were: several had holes in their roofs, while others were being devoured by ivy, ferns, grass, bamboo, and vines.

  Yet Tristan had the sense of a presence. Maybe this was nothing more than the lushness, vibrancy, and mystery of the jungle manifesting itself in her imagination. The human tendency to anthropomorphize whatever you laid eyes on. You looked at a cloud and saw a face. You looked at a grinning dog and assumed happiness where it might actually be anxious or hot. The jungle was warm, moist, bountiful, and all-surrounding; therefore it must be menacing and full of secrets.

  Still, it was hard to imagine there was no one here. It had too many resources, too much easy food, water, and shelter. Beyond that, it was magnetic in a way she had never felt in her life. She felt angry with herself for not having come here sooner. Angry, too, at whoever must be hidden in Hana: she wanted it for herself.

  At sunset, they followed a side road to a crooked red house that was hardly any sturdier than the Fallback Shack had been. They swept the leaves from the covered back porch and settled in.

  "It's not very loud for a jungle," Alden said. "Kind of spooky, though."

  "You scared?"

  "Are you kidding? This place is awesome. Why did we waste so much time at the hotels?"

  "Too busy to explore, I guess." As soon as she spoke the words, she knew they'd applied to her pre-plague life, too, and the thought she'd repeated them on Maui troubled her deeply. "Let's not let that happen again."

  She woke before dawn and discovered herself comically excited to get going. She forced herself to sleep a while longer, but Alden got up while it was still dark and rustled off through the brush, then through his pack. She stretched and got up. They ate and headed on.

  Sometimes she could see the ocean below them to the left, or the mountain above them to the right, but for the most part, they walked enclosed by the trees, surrounded by the smell of pollen, fresh water, and rotting leaves. She wasn't certain how far they had traveled into Hana: fifteen miles? Twenty? They had at least that far to go before reaching its end. Once they made their first pass, they'd backtrack along the shore and hunt for a permanent place to stay.

  The road cut through a thicket of palms. Ahead, a stone bridge spanned a creek. As they approached, a man shouted from the woods.

  Tristan slunk off the road into the trees. Alden moved beside her, unslinging his rifle and holding it upright in front of him. A girl shrieked. Tristan clenched her teeth. Something landed in the water with a resounding splash. Both voices laughed, carrying up the stream bed.

  "I thought we were hearing a murder," Alden laughed softly. "Well?"

  "Well what?"

  "We're scouting for people, aren't we? We just found some."

  "They do sound awfully happy for cannibals." Tristan gazed downhill, but the trees were too thick to see past. "Stay behind me."

  She wiggled her pistol in its holster, making sure the draw was clear, and headed down the incline, stepping at an angle and holding stray branches for balance. Down in the water, the man said something and the girl laughed. They were still splashing around when Tristan stepped from the woods onto the edge of a cliff.

  The water glimmered twelve feet beneath her. The pool was a hundred feet across, fed by a waterfall feeding from another pool on a terrace above it. The ground was solid lava rock. Water spilled from the pool through a shallow stream before stutter-stepping down a quick series of drops and finally meeting the ocean a hundred yards away.

  The pair treaded water near the falls, black-haired and brown-skinned, and for a moment Tristan felt guilty to be watching them, as if her presence were an intrusion on something pristine, something that didn't belong to her. Then she felt foolish: these weren't native Polynesians who'd stepped from the past to reclaim what was once theirs. The girl wore a yellow two-piece and the young man, when he waded dripping to shore to find his towel, wore board shorts patterned with fire.

  "That never gets any warmer!" he declared, pulling his towel around his shoulders and huddling up.

  The girl paddled toward the falls. "Maybe you just need to get braver."

  "If brave means you could use my nuts to make iced tea, then fuck brave." He glanced up the short cliff and his face went slack. "Run! Right now!"

  The girl in the water looked up in confusion. The boy spun and dug into a pack beside his shirt and sandals. Tristan went for her pistol.

  "Hang on!" Alden said, sliding the rifle from his shoulder and letting it hang from his hand by the strap. "We're not here to hurt anyone." He let the gun fall to the dirt. "We're just here to find a home."

  "Ke?" the girl said.

  Beside the pool, Ke froze, hand hidden in his pack. "And where does spying on us fit into that?"

  "We're not spying," Tristan said. "We heard your voices. Now get your hand off that gun. If we want it, we've got the drop on you."

  Ke bit his lip, showing his teeth, and stood. "What do you want?"

  "To know more about this place. Can we come down and talk?"

  He glanced at the girl. It was a protective look, not permission-seeking, but the girl tipped her face forward and gave him a look. Ke flexed his jaw and flicked his eyes back to Tristan. "Anything weird, and you never make it out of this jungle."

  Annoyance flared in Tristan's chest, but she nodded and moved her hand from her hip. It took a minute to find a path down the miniature cliff.
She let Alden lead, keeping one eye on Ke. And the girl, who got out of the water and toweled off briskly. Alden got down to the smooth rock surrounding the pool and stopped ten feet from the strangers. The girl had draped her towel over one shoulder and Alden was forcing himself to keep his eyes on hers. Tristan pegged her for her late teens or early twenties.

  "I'm Alden," he said. "What's your name?"

  "Don't tell him," the young man said.

  She rolled her eyes. "Robi. This is my brother Ke."

  "Cool names," Alden said. "Are you from here? I mean, did you always live here, or did you move after the plague?"

  "Honolulu," Robi said. "We came here when things started getting bad."

  "Same here. We had to sail all the way from California."

  "By yourselves?"

  "Yeah. We almost died about three times, though."

  "We've been living in Lahaina," Tristan said, her amusement with the conversation fading rapidly. "Three days ago, the aliens wiped it out."

  "Ones from the volcano?" Ke said. "What did you do to them?"

  "I think someone from town stumbled into them. Disturbed them." She moved ahead before he could ask more. "You know about them? Do they know about you?"

  Ke shrugged. He was lean and he had an aster-shaped scar on his shoulder from an old gunshot. "If so, they leave us be. Fly south every week or two, that's it. You came here to escape?"

  "It seemed more prudent than getting bombed." Most of the trek through the jungle had been in shade, but the pool created a gap in the canopy and the sunlight was hot and direct. Tristan reached for her pocket. Ke flinched. She withdrew a cloth and dabbed her brow. "Are there more of you here?"

  "What does it matter?"

  "I'd prefer to make my new home on ground that someone else doesn't consider theirs."

  "Then keep moving," Ke said.

  "Ke," Robi said. She gave him a dirty look, then turned to Tristan. "You want to know what's up, go talk to Papa Ohe'o. He lives right down the coast. Cross the stream and follow the shore like a quarter mile and you can't miss it."