"See that?" He pointed out the edge of the curtained window. Down the block, fires bloomed in the windows of another building right down the block. "Started a few hours ago."
"You know the reports. How little food we have. Do you think we should run?"
"Man, I don't even know. We're not talking about running out to the corner for a pack of smokes. We're talking about a 25-mile hike to San Pedro. We book it, and there's a good chance one of those jets vaporizes us all."
"But if I asked you to, would you march forth?"
He gave her a quizzical look. "I ever bucked orders before? We got thirty people up in here. You say you know how to get them home, and I'll be pushing them behind you like a Japanese subway conductor."
She found Mauser out in the hall and drew him aside. "The fires grow close. If the wind shifts, they'll be on us by day's end."
"The problem that solves itself—if the wind shifts, we'll also have plenty of smoke to move under the cover of."
"Get the warriors ready. We leave tonight."
The yellow-gray haze darkened further. They could discern no pattern to the alien foot patrols: sometimes they were spaced two hours apart, sometimes less than ten minutes. The wind turned to the northeast; by nightfall, the apartments north of the burning building had caught fire as well.
Raina gathered her refugees on the second floor. All had guns or bows, but many now carried clubs or long kitchen knives as well. Outside, a squadron of aliens appeared down the north end of the street. They made a tour of the block before returning to the north, disappearing into the smoky night.
Thirty seconds after the Swimmers were out of sight, Raina moved out the front door. She hadn't been in the street in close to two days, and for a moment, she felt as transfixed as a deer in the rifle's scope. Smoke hung thickly to the east. With the way south shut by fires, and by aliens to the north, Raina led the way west into a neighborhood of mixed apartments and shops. She could hardly have asked for better conditions under which to move. Yet with thirty people on the march, it would be hard to hide should a Swimmer appear.
She dispatched two scouts ahead and a third to hang a block behind. She hadn't progressed more than a quarter mile from the apartment building when the two forward scouts returned.
"Swimmers ahead," Peter said. "We have to get off the street right now."
With a growl, Raina headed for the nearest apartment. They piled inside it and took refuge on the eighth floor. As they settled in, Swimmers strode through the street below.
It took five minutes for them to leave. Raina waited another twenty to authorize her soldiers to search the apartments for supplies. The building had been picked clean long ago. However, it had also been occupied at some point. To store rain, buckets and bins had been left on the roof, containing many gallons of water. It was dirty and clotted with algae, but given the fires everywhere else, Raina thought it would be safe to boil it without giving away their position.
Besides, without it, their water wouldn't last another day.
She summoned Mauser to an apartment, shutting the door behind him. "We were only able to travel for ten minutes before their patrols forced us back into hiding. I'm afraid the city will burn down before we have time to escape it."
He lowered himself to a chair. "This is a dilly of a pickle. They have troops on the ground all over the place. We've got 25 miles or more to travel. If we're spotted by a single patrol, they'll call in an airstrike. We can try to wait them out, but we'll run out of food tonight. The longer we wait, the weaker we'll get."
"And the harder it will be for us to sustain a march." She clenched her jaw. "If they want us dead so badly, why don't they root us out?"
"I imagine this is a resource conservation strategy. For an occupying force, urban warfare is one of the costliest struggles there is. Knowing they have a limited supply of troops, and that this city is one of scores they'll have to pacify, they'd rather let the fires do the hard work."
"While their warriors murder anyone who tries to flee."
"It's an elegant solution."
"You've located the heart of the matter. How to stab it?"
Mauser fished a plastic bag from his pocket. It held three orange chips. He ate two. "I see two options. In the first, we declare 'damn the torpedoes,' make a run for it, and let the chips…" He gazed mournfully at his nearly empty bag. "…fall where they may. In the second option, we give up the notion of a prolonged march, and resign ourselves to advancing by hops, skips, and jumps, just like we did today."
She tapped her nails on the hilt of her sword. "The aliens patrol those places that don't burn until the fires arrive to destroy any who lurk there. Do you suppose they continue to patrol the areas that have already burned?"
"If they do, presumably they're far less vigilant about it. Would be a waste of resources otherwise."
"So we do as we did at the mall. We walk into the fire."
"Right. There is at least one problem with this bold strategy: the deadliness of fire."
"We travel through those zones that have already burned. Since there will be fewer aliens there, we will have less chance of being seen."
He stood over the table, using his finger to draw lines in the dust on its surface. "Here's the airport. We can safely assume they've enhanced security since our last visit. We won't want to get too close. But there were fires north and northeast of it, too. If we pass through those zones, we can skirt LAX, then cut south to San Pedro."
"Then that is our plan," Raina said. "As soon as the water is ready, we return to the flames."
* * *
Yet by the time the water was boiled, the patrols had returned.
These were far more frequent than before. As if a little bird had sung their plans to the aliens. As if they knew where Raina hid, and smugly waited for the flames to take her rather than to waste the bombs. She knew that, unless this was more of Mauser's "resource preservation," there was no way this was true. And yet, as the Swimmers rounded the streets, rarely out of sight for more than a few minutes at a time, Raina couldn't help feeling as though the enemy was hovering over her shoulder. And every time she turned, they did, too.
A day went by with no change besides an increase of smoke density in the once smog-free air. Her people had water, but the food was all gone. Her warriors, who had once operated together as smoothly as the muscles of a jaguar, argued and snapped over the smallest offenses. She felt it, too. The rebellion of her stomach.
Outside, though, the patrols flowed as steadily as the smoke of the advancing fires.
Day came to night. Raina sipped lukewarm water, rolling it around her mouth. The smell of the burning city enswamped them again. Raina headed downstairs to make use of the buckets they'd set up as latrines in one of the lower apartments. When she returned to her room, Mauser was waiting inside, standing in front of the curtained window, hands clasped behind his back.
"The fires will be here by tomorrow," he said.
"I expect so."
"We're in the exact same position we were two days ago. I keep hoping we'll catch a break. And time, as always, exposes my hopes for the soiled tinsel they are." He turned to her. The bones of his cheeks stuck out while his eyes withdrew. "We're being limited by the assumption that we can all get out of this alive. This seems less and less likely to be true. Rather than committing us all to dying, then, I have a suggestion: split up. Every man for himself. It will be much easier for a few of us to sneak past the patrols."
"Then a few of us will be all that makes it out. The others will be caught by the alien's sweeps. Alone, none of us will be able to fight back."
His features bent. "What the fuck else are we supposed to do, Raina? We step outside, and the squid shoot us. We stay here, and the fires barbecue us. We're starving. How many more days until we can't fight at all? One? Two?"
She lowered her eyes. It was her own vision that had trapped them. The dream of uniting the city had led, in turn, to the delusion that they could stand a
gainst the aliens. By contrast, Mauser's vision was to split them apart and reduce them to seeds on the wind, a diaspora too broad to be recaptured. Some would escape. She knew it.
But weeds thrived because of their cheapness. None lasted more than their year. If she dashed her group apart, they too would be destroyed by the winter borne by the ship.
Her vision had trapped them. Could it not also save them?
"We will go forth tonight," she said. "Into the fire. Together."
Mauser rolled his eyes. "We tried this two days ago and didn't make it half a mile. What makes this time any different?"
"This time, we have water. We won't have to stop for more." She smiled grimly. "And this time, we know there's no other hope of salvation."
Mauser pressed his hands to his face. He began to laugh. "Why do I continue to follow you on these mad quests? I used to be a skeptic."
* * *
They gathered on the second floor, awaiting the signal from below.
In the gloom of the hallway, their faces were all turned her way, eyes alight with a hunger for more than the food they lacked: a hunger for hope.
"Tonight, we survive," she said. "No matter what it takes—we survive."
The warriors nodded grimly. Raina took up a bowl of ash she had collected from the roof and drew a streak of it from her eyebrows down to each cheek.
"We're of the flame now." She moved among her soldiers, adorning each of them in the same way. "By this ash, it will know us. And we will pass through it."
Below them, Bryson whistled. They descended the stairs. Raina exited the front door. The streets were silent, empty. She headed south, jogging at a speed she knew she couldn't keep up for more than a mile. Her stomach felt like a damp plastic bag, its sides stuck together by its own emptiness. She drew her swords.
The others ran alongside her her. She gestured them to slow down and let her get ahead. She took a lead of a block and a half; as in the days of the plague, when she'd been a child among dogs, she found herself at the head of the pack. Though the air stank of char and ruin, she wouldn't have traded it for the freshness of a wind off a glacier.
Ahead, the sky lightened with the false dawn of fire. She ran toward it, her feet as light as sparks. With the flames glowing hotter to the southwest, she turned right at the next intersection, meaning to reach the worst of it as fast as she could.
Before her, two Swimmers rocked on their spiked feet and reached for their guns.
She sprung forward. A club-like tentacle lashed at her oncoming katana. She batted the limb aside, stabbing with her short sword and nicking the alien's torso. As it lifted its laser, her katana slashed through its tentacle, sending it to the ground with a meaty plop.
The second alien was circling around her back, angling for a shot past its partner. Raina fell prone and snatched the laser from the severed tentacle. She had seen them used before and knew the secrets of their buttons. She pressed them. A blue stream plowed into the second alien's torso, blackening it. Hot steam jetted to the sides. The alien curled on itself, staggering away. She popped to her feet and shot it a second time.
A club-limb hammered her in the back. Raina staggered forward. Knowing she couldn't stop herself from tripping, she threw herself into the fall, bending her sword arm above her head and using it to guide her roll. Halfway through, she straightened her gun arm and fired at the alien behind her.
It listed, guts crackling. As her warriors poured into the street behind her, Raina kneeled and shot the alien again. It writhed and died.
Raina stood over the body. It smelled like clams grilled in the shell. Her stomach burbled. "One problem has been solved."
Mauser stared at her blankly, then dropped his jaw. "You can't be thinking of doing what I think you're thinking of doing."
She crouched beside the body, tore off a chunk of laser-cooked flesh, and chewed.
16
One by one, Walt notched them on the butt of his laser.
The first was the one that had come into the house. The second came minutes later when what he assumed was its partner showed up in the yard to look for it. He shot it down in the bougainvillea. He was tempted to stick around and wait for the next fly to wander into the honeypot, but he knew them too well. They got pissed when you killed one of their buddies. The next response was more likely to be a carpet-bombing than a lone Swimmer.
He got together a bag and jogged away from the house. The north seemed to be a hellish maelstrom of explosions, fire, and more explosions, so he headed south for a quarter of a mile before settling on a structure that looked like an Angelino's idea of a Swedish tech mogul's house.
The third notch came that evening in the extremely long and narrow park/jogging path that ran down the center of the city. The alien was eyeballing the park rules and doggie poop bag dispenser as if they were sacred texts, so Walt sent it out on an intellectual note, lasering it in the back of the head while it was engaged in its scholarship.
Figuring it had a partner, he withdrew into the shrubs along the path. Sure enough, ten minutes later, a second Swimmer skittered onto the chipped bark trail. Walt shot it down, too. In a fit of pique, he stripped both bodies of all their clothes—at least some of them carried homing signals—then dragged them by the tentacles into the neighborhood across the street, a place where the land had once been so valuable the homes had no space for yards or parking.
He left the corpses in a garage, then jogged a few blocks up the street to watch the park. An hour later, having seen no other patrols, he strolled back to the garage.
"How do you like your occupation now, asshole?" He glared down at the nearest corpse. Rudely, it refused to answer. "Too ashamed of yourself to speak, huh? I'll do it for you. I don't know how you guys do it on your idiot planet—which, by the way, probably smells like snail diapers—but down here, occupations don't have a lot of success. Like, did you never hear of Vietnam? Iraq? Roman Britain? What are you planning to do, build a giant orange wall around the city to keep us out?"
He circled around the second body, giving its backside a boot. It felt like kicking a tire. "Did you think this was going to be easy? What the fuck do you think happened to the first ship? We've spent the last million years gainfully murdering our own species. How did you think we were going to react when the bug-eyed crab-squid flew in here and tried to kick us off our own planet? Killing our friends? Our families? Our wives?"
On speaking this word, anger coursed through him like a drug. He lifted his foot and slammed his heel on the body's head. Its neck, bent at a bad angle, cracked. He stomped again and again, then fell back, hands shaking, and went inside the house. In the kitchen, he found a meat cleaver. He returned to the garage and, in five manic hacks, chopped off the body's head.
He wished he knew more about their taboos—or anything about them, really—but they seemed to have strong feelings about seeking revenge for their dead, which implied certain things about their feelings toward the mistreatment of those dead.
With that in mind, he hacked off the second corpse's head, found a step ladder in the garage, and used it to spike the heads on corner street signs a block apart. He dragged a body beneath each sign, stepped back, then knotted two pairs of tentacles around each post to prevent dogs from dragging off the carcasses.
He wiped off his hands and gave a middle finger to the sky.
* * *
Early that night, he woke, pissed where he felt like it, ate some junk he'd taken with him from the house he'd abandoned, then spent a few hours lying in wait until a solitary Swimmer wandered past. He shot it dead, squatted bare-assed over it, and dropped a steaming load.
Why had no one ever told him how good it felt to be a savage? Had people known and kept it secret so the world economy wouldn't collapse into nothing but knives and loincloths? That was what Samuel Johnson had been talking about with his making a beast of yourself stuff, wasn't it? Ditch the veneer of civility, the notion of guilt, the exhausting supplications of social behavior
, and you would feel freer than you'd ever known.
He'd had that in the first few months after the plague. Once he'd come into contact with Otto, Mia, Raymond, and the L.A. resistance movement, he'd reemerged from the fog of savagery in a hurry. He'd thought that return had been an improvement.
At the time? Maybe it had been. Now, though, he had critters to kill.
He found a bottle of Old Crow, keeping his flask of fightin' juice topped off at all times. He didn't want to get too out of it, but he found a decent buzz helped dispel his social instincts to hesitate or back away from confrontation. Or maybe it just helped him not think of Carrie.
It rained overnight. But judging by the pall in the air—to say nothing of the ash fluttering around like the ghosts of moths—it wasn't doing much to slow down the fires. It felt appropriate. As if, after a few false starts, the world was finally coming to its end.
He slept most of the day, patrolling from dusk through dawn. At the approach of the third morning since the balloon, he crossed the narrow park and hiked into the neighborhoods bordering the shop-heavy region around PCH. Bodies lay broken in the road. Human. Six of them. Scorched by lasers. Walt withdrew to some shrubs down the street, sipping bourbon. With the sky lightening, and no hint of nearby crabs, he went back for another look at the corpses.
Their skin was as cool as the air. He looted their food and water, which they didn't have much of, along with a pair of binoculars, a righteous chrome pistol, two spare magazines, and a half-empty box of bullets. One of the bodies had a bow and arrows. Raina's people. Looked like their campaign had fared about as well as his had.
He'd relocated to a house three blocks north of the garage where he'd cut up the Swimmers. On his way back, he made his way to the corner with the two spiked heads, stopping a block away. Pale blue light shined from the intersection. A Swimmer gazed up at one of the heads, tentacle flicking over its communication pad.
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