Laser in hand, Walt walked up behind it. While he was still fifty feet away, its two thick, central tentacles twitched. It spun, eyes open as wide as they got.
"What do you intend to do with that pad?" Walt said. "Take a picture of me from my bad side?"
The creature held perfectly still.
"Pretty stupid move, bringing a computer to a laser-fight. But I'm not one to shoot an unarmed alien. Draw, you son of a bitch."
The alien kept on staring. Like Walt was the dull part of a movie.
"I said draw!"
It flinched. A claw dipped toward the laser holstered on the side of its oblong torso. Walt fired, sweeping the beam across its wrist-thick neck. Its head tipped back, half-severed. The body dropped into a pile like loose kindling.
He shot it a few more times. Satisfied it was dead, he walked over to it and pried its gun from its claws, pocketing it. He left everything else behind and ran from the street.
His dreams that night weren't what you'd call fun. Drowning. Falling into trenches in the ocean and being crushed by the water as the faces of Swimmers shifted in and out of the murky light. Walking through malls where the bodies of the dead hung from the racks like winter coats.
He woke on the floor of the closet where he'd made his bed, sheets sweaty, wan afternoon light peeping beneath the door. His eyes were gritty. His head felt like a can of spray paint after a good shake. Carrie was still gone. By this point, she was probably dead. He got his laser from beside his pillow and ran his thumbnail over the notches in its butt. Five.
Feeling bad was stupid. He reached into the corner for the bottle of Old Crow. It lifted too easily. Would need to do some scavenging later. He took a drink. Within a minute, he felt looser. You could criticize alcohol for plenty of other faults, but it had an amazing delivery system.
He didn't feel like eating, but he did feel like killing, and killing took energy. Taking one for the team, he ate one of the meat pies he'd gotten off the dead people. Meat pies. Before the Panhandler, had he ever eaten one of those in his life? Now they were everywhere. What would cuisine have evolved into if the aliens hadn't come back? Very regional, in his experience. Considerably simpler, too, now that everyone had to grind their own flour, spices, and so forth. No processed sugar to speak of.
He stopped chewing, mouth agape. Why had he never thought to become a sugar baron? He could have traveled to an island where they grew it—Barbados or whatever—and assembled a communal farm. While the others kept that running, he'd sail a ship full of sugar cane up to trade with Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and whatever the coastal cities were down south. And no need to be so United States-centric. Buenos Aires was in easy reach of the Caribbean. They probably had some cool shit down there.
New York, too. Despite his recent case of Californiaism, he retained a fondness for his old stomping grounds. He was certain that, barring a total leveling of Manhattan, the survivors there had gone on to do just fine.
He took another drink. A reflective one. That, in the end, was the worst part of what the Swimmers had done. After the invasion, humanity had had six years largely to itself. Just enough time to start to get its feet under itself. To build new communities. Relationships. Hope.
That was gone now. Kicked over like an anthill. It would have been less cruel if the first invasion had finished the job. If no one had survived the virus.
Well, time to go spread the misery around.
He watched through the windows as the afternoon bled away. Jets screwed around in the clouds. The occasional bomb went off, but the attacks had calmed in the last couple days. As twilight fell, he geared up and descended to the street.
His first stop was the intersection with the heads on the posts. He entered a house three blocks uphill from the site and, using his fancy new binoculars, spied on it. The heads were gone. So were the bodies. So was the third alien he'd killed there before bed. They'd seen his work, then. Argument for caution.
Still, he smiled. Always nice to be noticed.
He made the rounds, bouncing down to the beach, then south into Hermosa, then zigzagging east and north, stopping often to watch and listen. He stopped to eat another meat pie and washed it down with the last of the Old Crow. Unacceptable. He took a break from roving to do some looting. Most of the good stuff was long gone, with the houses now acting as wildlife preserves for an assortment of dust, grime, rot, and the insects that fed on this and each other. But apparently there was an entire class of survivors out there who didn't consider alcohol "essential," because he soon scared up a bottle of scotch, another of tequila, and a bottle of green peppermint schnapps called Wondermint.
The bottles were heavy and noisy. He funneled the contents into plastic jugs, packing them tight in his backpack. Mission accomplished, he wandered back outside.
He'd only made it three blocks before he heard the clatter of spiked feet on pavement. He cut through a yard and got down behind a wooden fence. Through a gap in the boards, he watched as eight aliens made their way down the street, four on each side, spaced ten feet apart. Too many and too loosely aligned to think of taking them all on. They were already within a hundred feet of him. Too close to risk running and setting off their sense of motion. He stayed put, a laser pistol in hand. They clicked along the sidewalk, passing so close to the fence he could smell the brine wafting from their bodies.
Their steps faded into the distance. He stood and snuck off in the opposite direction. Two hours later, he ran into another patrol of five. He thought hard before allowing them to pass in peace.
He headed in the general direction of home. Feeling dawn on the way, he trudged up the street to his new house situated on the corner. Up the street, pale blue light shined behind the window of a steel and concrete modern house. Not a laser. More like a tablet. The glow snapped off. Walt came to a stop. He tensed his legs, preparing to run. Far away, a jet engine increased in volume.
He walked quickly to the front door of his house. Once inside, he ran toward the back door, exited into the private alley behind his home, and hurried into the neighboring house's side door. This opened to a colossal mess of smashed-up furniture. Swearing vigorously, Walt clambered through it. To his left, a kitchen opened onto a courtyard. He ran into it, scampering past a guest house and into the side street beyond.
The jet's engines pitched up into a scream. Now that he had a row of houses between himself and the searchers, Walt sprinted full-bore up the side street. This hit a T-intersection. He turned right onto another narrow road entirely hemmed in by street-front houses, rushing past four more rows of homes. The jet whisked through the air, engines fading behind it. He cut right down another of the tight streets, heading toward where he'd first seen the light.
Even though he was expecting it, the noise of the bomb hitting his house caused him to throw himself reflexively to the ground. He landed hard, grunting, then picked himself up, palms stinging. A hell-ball of fire gushed from the site. Boards and stone rained down on the street. Walt barred his arms over his head and ran on.
He emerged on the main road two homes down from the steely modern one. Heart pounding, he stole behind the brush outside the front door and got out both laser pistols. The door squeaked open. Like a spider crawling out of a drain, an alien flowed through the door, extending itself on the porch. A second followed, then a third. Without closing the door behind them, they moved down the walk toward the street.
Walt kept himself pressed tight to the overgrown shrubs. The first Swimmer strode past, gazing at the smoke billowing from the crater down the street. So did the second. Walt held his breath. The third alien clacked past, engrossed in its glowing blue pad.
Walt shot the middle alien in the back with both guns. Its superheated wounds screamed as gas escaped into the air. He turned one pistol on each of the survivors, gunning them down as they reached for their weapons. Once they were down, he shot all three in the head twice. The stink of blackened chitin overwhelmed the acrid smoke of the bombing.
The modern house's front door was still open. Beyond, the foyer was completely dark. Walt took a swig of tequila from his flask and slipped inside. He moved from room to room, stopping for a few seconds in each one before moving on.
Two minutes later, with the house cleared, he returned to the front walk and shook his head at the corpses.
"Well, you got my house." He tossed his laser in the air, spinning it. "But let's see what we run out of first: my houses, or your troops."
* * *
Four Swimmers advanced down the street two by two. It was almost dusk, the day after the bombing of his house, but Walt had hardly slept. The aliens had been moving through the streets all day. Never in groups smaller than four. Like they were scared.
Yet that wasn't stopping them from hunting him.
Night came on. The Swimmers cut through the streets every fifteen or twenty minutes. Walt sipped tequila, nibbling on a lime he'd picked earlier from one of the yards. It wasn't very sour. Kind of tasted like generic citrus. Almost all the fruits and vegetables tasted different than the mass-grown store-bought varieties had. The meats were different, too. He'd gotten used to it, but when you returned to one of the old rituals, like tequila and lime, you were reminded how it used to be.
Twice, a flurry of gunshots went off, soon silenced. Halfway through the night, with rain beating down on the roof and his frustration boiling over, he invented a drinking game where he took a shot every time he saw a new patrol. He was soon so drunk that he dropped his glass on the kitchen floor. Its shatter felt as loud as a gunshot. Pulse racing, he ran upstairs and got into a closet, both guns gripped in his fists. He was still in the closet when he woke up.
The next day started with more of the same. He watched them dourly, sipping tequila with lime squeezed into it. Early that evening, as a group of six Swimmers traipsed down the street, they stopped in their tracks. One lifted a glowing pad. It gestured to the others. They took off at a run to the north, leaving the streets deserted.
An hour later, Walt still hadn't seen them return. Or any others. He moseyed downstairs and out into the road. Ash dusted the cars. It wasn't sticking to the pavement, though, and as he walked along, he didn't have to worry about leaving footprints. His eyes darted from one patch of cover to the next. Half an hour later, he hadn't seen a single alien.
He stopped at a corner beside the long, thin park. There was something wrong with the street sign. Took his eyes a long moment to figure out what. The sign was topped by a head. Human. Short hair, but despite that and the bruising that obscured the details of the face, he thought it was a woman's. It smelled far worse than a head should. Fermented. Reeking. Like guts.
Somehow, he'd missed the body propped against a garbage can. Naked. Stomach cut open, intestines spilled across its lap like a drunk who's puked on himself. Female, and youngish, judging by the quality of its skin.
Walt retreated to the juniper bushes on the corner and squatted down. The message was obvious. What they had neglected to consider, however, was that he had already witnessed them kill billions, thousands of those in person. One mutilated body was supposed to demoralize him? Scare him? The real message behind the corpse was that his tactics were getting to them.
Through the rest of the night, he saw a lone Swimmer patrol, eight strong. He found two more humans. Both were dead, displayed more or less like the first. He sipped his tequila and walked on. He earned no new notches that night.
The following day was quiet, too. The night was a repeat of the previous one. Enemy activities few and far between. When they did make an appearance, they traveled in packs too large to take on. A gnawing sensation grew in the base of Walt's skull. His right temple ached; a sense of unease crept into every thought. Sometimes his hands shook. Easy to blame that much, or even all of it, on the tequila.
But he knew himself too well to accept his self-deceit. It wasn't the booze. It was Carrie. And the Swimmers walking the streets he could do nothing about.
He went back to his latest house, the third he'd occupied since the balloon. He hadn't bathed since washing off the salt water. He thought about doing that, or at least scrounging up some fresh clothes, but who did he have left to fool?
He slept as long as he could, waking for good when the sun was low to the west behind a gray sheet of clouds. The ship was still there, too, an inverted black sun. Walt waited for the light to leave, then walked from the house. Two hours later, he'd seen nothing but another hacked-up human body.
He turned a corner. Three blocks down, two Swimmers stood beneath a tree, backs to him. It was the smallest group he'd seen since they'd changed tactics. Walt backed up, pressing his face to the stucco wall of a house. At once, his headache lessened. He grinned, a gun in each hand.
Another pair of Swimmers emerged from a house across from the other two. They convened beneath the tree, gesturing with their tentacles. Walt's smile retracted. Four was one or two more than he wanted to deal with. But you didn't always get what you wanted, did you? Wasn't that the single lesson of life, repeated until you choked on its bitterness? They'd given him four. So he'd kill four.
After some more waving around, the aliens headed north. Walt ran parallel to them. After a few blocks, he turned left, pressing himself against the wall of a Victorian house. Their footsteps tapped closer. It was going to be the simplest ambush in the world—wait for them to go past him, then shoot them in the back—but simple tended to work.
Two Swimmers walked past the corner. One stopped less than twenty feet from Walt, motioning to the other. It turned, signing back. Its eyes shifted to Walt, then back to its partner. It did a tremendous double-take, jerking up its laser.
Walt fired both pistols. One beam zoomed wide, starting a small fire on the house across the street. The second pulse struck the alien in the side. It jerked back, sending its return fire off course into the wall behind Walt. He shot the alien a second time, but it stayed on its feet.
Its partner was turning on him, shooting wildly. Walt turned and fled, firing both guns behind him. Heat crisped over his left forearm. The second laser fell from his grasp. He skidded around the corner of the house and tore across its piebald yard. A high white fence protected it from the neighbor. He jumped high against it, grabbed the top rail, and heaved himself up.
He dropped to the other side. Cement. His ankle buckled. The same one he'd broken late last year. Lasers flashed from the other side of the fence, burning into it. Walt ran through the weeds, limping, holding tight to his leg as if it might fall off. Each step was a new stab of pain. Stars fluttered in and out of his vision.
Chitin scrabbled against the fence. Walt stopped and crouched, straightening his arm. A white-eyed head popped from behind the slats. He shot it. The creature landed in the dirt with a heavy thud.
Walt got up and scurried through a side yard. The gate ahead was closed. He flung his shoulder into it and it popped open with a spang of metal. He stumbled into the street, eyes running with tears from his throbbing ankle. He ran downhill. Two houses down, the garage was open. He ran inside, smelling grease and dust, scanning for the spokes of a bike. Nothing. As he ran out, his eyes caught on a set of handlebars. Attached to a kid's scooter. He snatched it up and ran back into the street.
He planted his bad leg on the scooter, pushing with his good leg. Bobbing up and down hurt like a cougar was clamped down on his ankle, but it beat the hell out of running. He careened downhill, picking up speed.
A laser clipped past his head. He ducked, wobbling, then turned the handlebars. The scooter veered wildly. He hunched low, bringing his center of gravity closer to the ground. The scooter straightened. Walt glanced back. Two Swimmers ran down the street, but they were a hundred yards away and losing ground fast. Firing on the run, their shots zipped erratically, singeing rooftops and veering off to dissipate into the sky.
The road curved gently, taking the aliens out of view. He quit pushing, letting gravity take over. The road crossed a flat intersection and continu
ed toward the sea. He rattled along for another few blocks, then veered down a side street, losing momentum. After another two minutes of grueling scooting, he dismounted, carrying the scooter with him, and hobbled through the open door of a house.
He limped up the stairs, found a bathroom, locked the door behind him, and dropped himself in the dingy tub. Somewhere outside, a jet whined.
He took off his shoe and sock. His ankle was already swollen. Probably not broken, though. Not unless he was more inebriated—or more Supermanly—than he thought. A sprain. Now that he was off his feet, it seemed far less serious than he'd first thought.
The burn on his forearm was less immediately threatening to his ability to get around, but the oozing half-inch-wide strip carried a much higher threat of infection. He doused it in gin, gasping at the pain, and wrapped it with a strip of cloth he kept in his pack.
Other than scraped palms, he had no other damage to show for it. Awfully lucky. His breathing calmed. The pain settled to bearable throbs. His hands started to shake. A weight settled on his chest. The days of hunting them down one or two at a time were over. Every night he went out, it would be against odds as bad as the ones he'd just fled, if not worse. If they got sick enough of him, they'd probably do what they appeared to be doing to the north side of the city and burn the whole town down.
Since killing the alien in the first house, he'd known his campaign wouldn't wipe them out. But he'd held the unvoiced hope that it would hurt them bad enough to merit their attention. To slow them down, maybe, or distract them enough for whatever remained of Raina's army to take a real shot at them.
But he was nothing. A pebble in the shoe. A splinter in the fingertip. One more ambush, maybe two. That's as much as he could hope to pull off before his luck ran out. Eight or ten more dead Swimmers. Then one dead Walt.
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