Relapse (Breakers Book 7)

by Edward W. Robertson

  Raina reached Gaffey and sprinted northwest toward the far green hills. In the street, two women stared, heads swiveling as the four warriors passed by. Raina considered stopping to kill them so they couldn't tell Anson's soldiers where they had gone, but she recognized one of them. Jude. One of her citizens.

  Still running, Raina put her finger to her lips. Jude nodded, wide-eyed.

  Raina turned off Gaffey down a neighborhood of small houses painted like Easter. Ahead, a door slammed shut.

  "See that?" Carl said.

  "We need to get away from watching eyes. This way. To the fields."

  At the corner, Raina cut right, heading north. This was parallel to the green hills that were their destination, but it took them to a wide, weedy gulch between two housing developments. Raina ran to the embankment's lowest point, where she would be best hidden from the dusty windows of the houses on either side.

  The gulch was greener than the yards around it and smelled like pollen and damp. She could no longer hear any shouts or shots. In her head, she pulled up a mental map, replotting her course to the creek bed leading up the hills.

  "Get down!" Henna hissed.

  The girl threw herself flat into the grass. Raina followed, as did Carl and Bryson. Hoofbeats clattered ahead and to the left. Seconds later, a rider in a white cape came to the gravelly shoulder of the shallow gulch.

  He was two hundred feet away. Close enough that Raina expected Henna could hit him with an arrow, but far enough that she wasn't certain the first shot would be fatal. Behind the grass, she stayed perfectly still, wishing that she could learn to sway as it did.

  The rider turned, hoofbeats fading away.

  Raina stood and ran on. After a quarter mile, the gulch quit, stopped by a chain link fence thick with brown weeds. They glanced about, then scrambled up the links, corroded brown metal flaking off on Raina's hands with the smell of drying blood. The fence rattled and clinked. Raina dropped to the gravel on the other side, landing in a crouch. Bryson snagged the strap of his rifle and straddled the fence, wrangling it loose. He was the last to descend. As they crossed the street, horses thundered into the intersection a hundred yards to their left.

  A white cape whirled as a rider turned to his brethren. "There they are!"

  Another rider quick-drew a pistol, opening fire. Bullets whined off the asphalt. Raina darted into the brush beside the road. Henna loosed an arrow, then vaulted after Raina. Carl unloaded his pistol, firing across his body. Bullets shredded into the trees, knocking leaves and twigs into Raina's hair.

  The hill was thickly wooded and too steep for homes. As Raina ran, shots banged steadily from the street, tearing up the foliage. She kept her ears open. When they were halfway up the slope, hooves clacked, barely audible beneath the steady gunfire.

  "They're cutting us off," Raina said. "They'll be waiting at the top of the hill."

  Bryson glanced to the left, but the trees screened too thickly. "So we wait in here. Make them come after us."

  Henna snorted. "They won't do that. They'll sit out there and call for more soldiers."

  "There's only one move," Carl said. "Sneak off to the right. Try to slip around them."

  "That's the opposite way from the forest."

  "What other choice do we have?"

  Raina was about to agree with him when something small darted from the dead leaves ten feet ahead, bounding uphill like a lost bouncy-ball. As she watched, the mouse rushed to a funnel-shaped hole in the grass and disappeared.

  "There's another way." She came to a stop. "The tube."

  Henna's eyebrows shot up. "And if it's clogged?"

  "Then we're dead either way, aren't we?" Raina wasn't sure of this—Carl's plan might allow them to escape as well—but the enemy would be more likely to anticipate that move.

  Besides, she had been given a sign. Those who ignored such things isolated themselves from the world's wisdom. She didn't know why the world wanted some to survive—so often, it seemed to wish everyone on it dead—but she had heard its whispers too often to deny. There were times when she thought the plague had been sent to hush a humanity that had grown too deafening to hear anything but itself. If this were true, then ignoring these signs was more than foolish. It was to act in defiance of a force that could snuff you out with the barest flicker of its will.

  The ground was leveling out, drawing nearer to the road along the top of the long hill. She stopped, angling left and back downhill, slowing so she could plant her steps carefully among the dry, betraying leaves. Her breathing calmed. Uphill, a horse whinnied. Once she was able to snatch glimpses of the road framing the west edge of the woods, she stopped and held out a hand. The others went still. Raina moved forward alone and in silence.

  She walked twenty feet, sticking to bare dirt, and stopped. Fifty feet ahead, the street was shaded by the trees growing wild to either side of it. It looked empty, but Raina waited in stillness and felt that she was not alone.

  She scanned through the leaves, looking for movement, for the color of skin against the green. She didn't have long. The horsemen were waiting at the top of the hill and if her people stayed hidden much longer the enemy would send scouts in after them. All chance to run would be lost.

  She waited, though. Because this was her land and it was telling her to wait.

  Downhill and across the road, a twig snapped. Raina crept nearer, ducking her head for a look through a gap in the snarled bougainvillea. On the far shoulder, a young man stared into the forest, rifle in hand.

  She withdrew to the others. "They have a sentry across the road. Henna, if you're within a hundred feet of him, can you take him down with a single shot?"

  "It sounds like I don't have a choice."

  Raina smiled and brought her to the gap in the wall of red flowers. The young man was still beneath the trees across the road. In the shadows of the boughs, his eyes were as bright as quartz.

  Henna nocked an arrow and drew back the string. Cords and veins stood out from her tanned arms. She breathed out, held, and released.

  The bow twanged. The arrow speared across the road. The young man swung his head toward the sound and the arrow entered one of his quartz-like eyes. His head snapped back, his knees buckling.

  Raina slipped to the edge of the trees. The road was empty. She beckoned to Henna, who gestured to Carl and Bryson. As soon as they joined her, Raina ran onto the shoulder and across the road.

  She didn't look back until she had crossed into the trees on the other side. Henna loped ahead, scouting the path to the tube. They exited the trees to a quiet street of homes with broken windows and kicked-in doors. Beside the neighborhood, an eight-foot concrete tube ran down the hillside. For some fifty weeks of the year, it was dry, but during the rainy season, furious cataracts spilled down it, channeled away from the vulnerable homes on the slopes. Since the plague, parts of it had collapsed, broken by shifts in the ground and lack of maintenance.

  Raina climbed inside. Away from the cracks, the darkness was overwhelming. Their breathing echoed ahead of them. When the tube leveled out, muck and small stones silted its bottom. Over the span of a few hundred feet, the silt deepened until Raina had to duck, trailing one hand along the damp ceiling to prevent herself from bumping her head.

  She feared they would soon discover the way was clogged completely, but ahead, a shaft of light pierced the cave-like darkness. They wriggled out the crack into a rocky gully. Raina listened to the air and the world, but heard no sound of the riders. She headed up the gully through the lush and vacant homes and to the safety of the forest of Palos Verdes.

  * * *

  By two that morning, filthy and exhausted, the four of them made their way to the shore of the black waters. The waves dragged shreds of kelp up the rocks. The smell of salt hung in the air.

  The moon was too faint to reflect, so Raina lit the little signal lantern she had brought with her and shined it out to sea. After a few seconds, she doused the light and retreated to a stand of
trees removed from the exposed shore. Within five minutes, a rowboat fought through the currents and relayed them to the sloop.

  Raina was as tired as a yellowtail tuna after an hour on the line, but she kept watch on the docks of San Pedro until they were closer to Catalina than to the mainland.

  She slept until the following afternoon. After she woke and stretched and did her knife forms, she went downstairs to meet Mauser, who had left her a note. They exited the palace courtyard and into the grassy field beyond.

  When the building was a quarter mile distant, Mauser turned and folded his arms. "Well? Have we removed ourselves from prying ears?"

  "It isn't about who hears us," Raina said. "It's about us being able to hear what the land is trying to tell us."

  "Riiight. So what happened in Pedro? I heard it was a setup."

  Raina explained how the man on the stage had pretended to be Anson and how the sniper had fired on them before they'd exposed themselves.

  "That does sound fishy," Mauser said once she was done. "I dunno. The fact there was only one sniper and not three hundred could mean it was plain old bad luck."

  "It wasn't Anson. I'm sure of that. And this proves that killing him will not put an end to our fight against the People of the Stars."

  Mauser gave her a long look. "You realize that wasn't actually a second Anson, right? He can't split like some kind of perfectly-coiffed amoeba. If you kill the real Anson, he's gone."

  "It goes beyond that. Setting a trap like this proves that they are too clever to be stymied by the loss of their leader. Anson may be nothing more than an illusion. A dancing shadow cast by the hands of the people working in the darkness."

  "Plausible. Are you giving up the assassination strategy already? What else can we do?"

  "I have a new plan," Raina said. "If an elephant came to Catalina, how would you kill it?"

  "I wouldn't. An elephant is a marvelous creature."

  "It has slain your mother. You have vowed revenge."

  "I've done no such thing." Mauser shook his head. "An elephant's just an animal. You can't hold it to human moral standards."

  "Then it's destroying your field and your family will starve without it." She scowled. "Enough of your games, Mauser. It doesn't matter why the elephant needs to die. What matters is how you can bring it down."

  "In that case," he said, "I would shoot it. In the head. With an elephant gun. Just like we should do to Anson."

  "What if you don't have a gun?"

  "Are you still being metaphorical?" He tipped back his head and sighed at the sky. "Listen, Raina, as much fun as it is to play Genghis Socrates with you, it's clear you already have an answer in mind. Why don't we save ourselves the dosey doe and get to the point?"

  "You cut it," she said. "A thousand times. Until the trickles of blood converge into a river. The same way a pack of wolves kills a moose or a school of piranhas eats the cow."

  "You watched far too many nature documentaries as a kid. What are you proposing here? Some kind of guerrilla campaign?"

  Raina cocked her head. "Who said anything about gorillas?"

  "Guerrilla," he said, trying and failing to roll his R. "Spanish for 'little war.'"

  "I speak Spanish."

  "Well, clearly, I don't. Regardless, you get the gist. If you can't beat the enemy in the open field, then you refuse to meet him there."

  "I don't plan to." Raina rested her forearm on the hilt of her sword. "Not until I have weakened him with my thousand cuts. He thinks that taking San Pedro makes him strong? Wrong. That has only served to lengthen his neck—and make it that much easier to cut."

  She doubled the scouting presence on the mainland and spent days in discussion with Mauser, Henna, and others, collecting as many ideas for attack as she could get her hands on. These were plentiful: Anson had thirty miles of territory and supply lines to defend between the Heart and San Pedro. Another thirty miles of coast. He had pockets of workers and citizens scattered across the northern half of the basin and was now sending settlers to the south, stretching himself between the Hollywood Hills and Long Beach. He had nowhere near enough troops to keep such a broad swath of land safe.

  Not that Raina had wish to kill his people. As far as she knew, they were innocent of everything but falling for the lies of their leader. Yet there was much she could do to cut him without spilling the blood of his citizens.

  Many of these actions would require embedding her warriors in the People of the Stars or recruiting from those mainland citizens who remained loyal to her. She dispatched a handful of people with orders to trickle into the Dunemarket over the next few days and see what there was to see.

  She had no illusions about the timescale this would require—for fruit to ripen, it needed whole seasons—and so she met with Tina as well, forcing herself to be patient as she asked the administrator how much food and lifestuffs they were consuming and how much they were producing. There was a negative gap between these two things; prior to the battle that had turned them into refugees, Catalina had housed a hundred and fifty people. Now, there was something like four hundred. If aggressive measures were not taken, Tina predicted they would deplete their food stores in less than two months.

  Even if everything were to go as she hoped, it would take longer than that to bleed Anson to death. In truth, there was no telling: the future was like the waves at low tide. If you watched closely as each one receded, there was a moment when you thought the foam and churn might calm enough to see what lurked within. But just as that moment of clarity came, a new wave arrived, bringing swirling white chaos.

  "We need to gather the people," she said to Mauser and Viceroy Tina. "Let them know that this will be our home for some time. As such, we must build it into one."

  Mauser tugged a string on the fraying collar of his shirt. "What have we been doing until now?"

  "Keeping our back to the truth. Because to make this a home is to admit that we have lost our old one. Before we can move forward, we have to face what's before us."

  "Kind of like a twelve-step program. Step one: admit that shit is all fucked up. Steps two through twelve: go stomp the People of the Stars into pink sludge."

  Tina eyed him sidelong, like he was sporting a bone in his nose, then turned to Raina. "I'll arrange for the assembly. When would you like to give your speech?"

  "As soon as possible," Raina said. "I won't hide any longer."

  Most of the people lived on the island's east coast, in Avalon and the surrounding hills, but some had spread out to farm and ranch across Catalina's twenty-mile length. Tina sent messengers to let them know that a high council would be held in three days. In the gaps between meetings, Raina walked through the fields and along the shore, letting the wind bring her the words she would deliver to her tribe.

  The council was held on the grounds of the high round building on the point at the north end of the city. Mauser claimed it had once been a casino, but since the days of Karslaw, it had been the Scaveteria, the place where they stored the goods salvaged from the wake of the Panhandler virus. Raina had thought this was a much better system than allowing those who were greediest and most scared to hoard goods they might never need, so after Karslaw's death, she had ordered Tina to preserve it.

  In the parking lot, they had built a loose stage of boards and planks, but she waited in the shadow of the building while the people filed in and sat on benches and blankets. It was strange to see them gathered: they were so many yet so few.

  She climbed onto the stage. Many of the people had been too busy to attend, yet something like two hundred faces gazed up at her.

  "We are here," she said, "because from this spot, we must see the mainland. We have no choice. From here, it looks far away and there are times when it feels farther. When I look at it, I wonder if we were forced from it for a reason. If, perhaps, Catalina is our true home."

  Raina walked down the stage, gazing at the blue heights of the coast. "But this does not feel right. We built that pla
ce. That home. It does not wish to be owned by another. It wants to be ours.

  "It may feel as though our home is gone for good. Yet every spring, I watch Orion the Hunter leave the night sky. For months, he is nowhere to be found. I would fear that he is gone for good—except I know that, come winter, he will return.

  "We may see him come and go more than once before it is so, but San Pedro will be ours again. To make that happen, we must work together to make this island our home in the meantime. Those who wish to farm will be given land to do so. Those who wish to work the fields will be apportioned their share. Those who are good with their hands may work to repair the ships in this harbor and fit them with nets for fishing. Made ready, these boats will need fishermen. And as we work to make this home, our warriors will patrol the shores, scout the mainland, and harry our foe. I will need all of you."

  She paused to taste the mood in the air. She thought they were with her, but a crowd's favor was like the fog from the sea: it could overwhelm you without warning, only to burn away just as quickly.

  "We will work to make ourselves safe. But there is a danger in believing we are too safe. I have met Anson. I have fought him. I know his heart." She laughed wryly, the noise hanging in the damp air. "Although I do not think it takes special insight to know that a man who would ally with aliens has a heart as black as the night beyond Orion's belt."

  This drew a few chuckles. She moved to the edge of the stage. "As long as he's there, and the monsters are in their ship, we'll never be safe. The days ahead will be long ones. When you grow tired, remember that we are working now because if we don't push back, it is only a matter of time before they come for us again."

  She stayed there a moment, gazing across them, then dropped from the stage and walked through the parking lot.

  Mauser fell in beside her. "Off so soon?"

  "How can I tell them to work hard if I don't work harder?"

  "Because you're the boss. The Big Kahuna. Ordering people to slave on while you kick back with a cigar is the entire reason people do what you do."