"That doesn't bode well for the I-5."
Mia nodded, frowning. "I don't suppose you ever took a whole lot of flying lessons you never told me about."
He threw it in reverse, did a head check, laughed to himself, then flipped around and, with a strange little thrill, drove the wrong way back to the onramp. Cool sea air flowed through Mia's window. The 405 stayed drivable all the way to Santa Monica, where one of its banking turns became tangled with shorn metal and fire-bubbled paint. Raymond clucked his tongue and got out on foot. His flashlight swept over bones and sun-tautened skin. The pileup was only a couple cars deep, but beyond, stalled and silent cars clogged the road like shiny boulders.
"Seen enough?" he said.
"The PCH runs north for hundreds of miles."
"You want to check every one of them?"
"Just the ones that lead out of here. If they're serious about wiping us out, the city will be the worst place we could be."
He backtracked down the highway and swung into Santa Monica, which he knew about as well as Bangkok. Figuring the streets he'd heard about before he moved to the area must go somewhere, he drove in widening circles until he intercepted Wilshire, then cut west among sand-colored apartment complexes, pink storefronts, and palm-lined sidewalks. A white sheet painted "HELP" flapped from the roof of a department store. He jagged the car around a wreck, glass crunching under the tires. On the corner, a man in a fur coat stared them down, ambling to the middle of the street as they drove past.
Wilshire flowed into the PCH. Dark cars angled the shoulder, but the road stayed navigable as the city sprawl cleared out into a solid row of beachside houses to one side and yellow hills to the other. He drove for three miles, headlights splashing the pavement, engine whirring through the emptiness.
"Pull over," Mia said.
He slowed, guided the car into the crunching gravel. "What do you think?"
"We could go right now. Just keep driving."
"Where would we go?"
"Somewhere with a stream. Or a lake. These days every house in the world is a mountain cabin without the mountain. Why not find a real one?"
He bit the skin inside his lower lip. "We'd lose the garden."
"Damn! If only plants could grow."
"Maybe all the sun and sea breezes have wiped your mind, but it's September. In places like mountains, that means it's fall. And you know what comes after fall?"
"Bourbon and eggnog?"
"Where are we going to find that? Or anything else we need?"
She cocked her head. "With all that food we found, I don't think we'll have a problem making it through a couple seasons."
"What about winter coats? Snow gloves? Axes or hunting rifles or great big piles of wood to burn when it gets cold?"
"So we'll stop by the first sporting goods store we see. We put our house together in like four months. Do you really think it would be that hard?"
He stared at the blank dashboard. "I like it here. I don't want to leave."
"Even if that means getting vaporized by aliens?"
"What happens when they come to the mountains? Do we go to the desert? The South Pole? The moon?" He ran his hands through his hair, clasping them behind his head. "How long do we run? Are we happy? If we're not, how do we find a place where we will be? I think if you find a place where you're happy, then you have to take risks to preserve it. Staying in the city's a risk. But so is lighting out for the mountains in the middle of the night when we don't know what we'll find there any more than we know what the invaders are going to do from here."
A slow smile lit her brown eyes. "I didn't know you felt that strongly."
"Do you really want to go?"
"I think we'd be safer. But I don't think we'd be happier."
He started the Charger back up and nosed his way across the median to the opposite lanes. Wet, cool air swirled through the windows. He would have missed that moist-salt smell, would wake every morning to the confused sense that something had been lost.
"Stop the car?"
He braced himself for another change of mind. Instead, she asked him to get out, then took him by the hand and led him to the moonlight-lined beach, where she laid their clothes on the sand as a blanket, then unzipped his pants and straddled him. On the way home, he drove shirtless and shoeless.
"Apparently sin truly is reserved for humanity," Josh Jones reported a few days later, "because the aliens buzzed out of Vegas in just two days. Grapevine hears tell of men on the ground. Alien men, that is, or possibly women, or men-women, or cloaca-sporting lobster-monsters who find our human penises and vaginas so sickening they crossed the inky void just to stamp us out. In any event, these things are said to have lots of spindly arms and legs, with skin as hard and crusty as old sourdough. Supposedly they spent a lot of time going into hotels and coming out with corpses. Not mummy-bones, either—big wet fresh ones. Like going down to the farmer's market, you know, except instead of coming home with ripe red tomatoes, it's dead bodies. These ground troops have been seen in Vegas after the ship set sail.
"And speaking of sourdough, the mother ship was last reported lumbering west for San Francisco. Stay safe, friends."
Raymond and Mia resumed gardening and water-gathering and foraging. In concession, he took a trip to the REI, where they went in with flashlights and loaded up the car with parkas, sleeping bags, axes of various sizes, lanterns and replacement lights, freshwater fishing tackle with its bright pink PowerBait, jack knives and hunting knives and scaling knives. Every single rifle was gone. Brass littered the floor, spinning away over the hard white tile and brown stains of dried blood.
Josh's reports grew sparse. More house-to-house alien raids in San Francisco, then up to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, where fleeing motorists were destroyed by scalloped black fighters with platoons of alien infantry remaining behind to scour the cities. For several days, Josh had no news of the aliens at all: the carrier had disappeared somewhere over Canada.
Raymond woke two weeks after the carrier's departure to see it hovering above the bay. Lumbering, beetle-like vessels disappeared into the city while the wedge-shaped blue fighters circled overhead. After striking out at two more sports stores, Mia had ventured back to the former house of the Mormons. She'd come back with a pair of scoped rifles, a .45 and a 9mm pistol, and green cardboard ammo boxes that felt far too heavy for their size. The morning of the aliens' return, she stuck the .45 in her belt and handed him the 9mm.
"Don't leave home without it."
That night gunfire crackled from the beach cities below them. Unseen ships keened below the cliffs. Fire blossomed a short ways inland, thick gray smoke angling into the sky. It burnt out by morning.
There wasn't much to do but watch from the windows. They held hands in silence. With warm afternoon sunlight banking off the waves, one of the heavy ships detached from the carrier and, flanked by two fighters, flew straight for the hills.
Mia pulled him away from the window into the lushly carpeted hallway, where they flattened their backs against the hall. The bass oscillation of an engine approached, climaxed, began to fade, then abruptly ceased.
"What's the plan?" Raymond said.
"Nothing to do but sit tight, is there? Unless you'd rather get blown up in the car."
"No. We can't afford the insurance bump."
He locked the door and drew the curtains. Hours passed with little more than the deep warble of the heavy vessel and the high whines of the fighters. Once, they heard the dry pop of pistols. With the sun hanging just above the horizon, an engine growled nearby. The staccato clatter of steps struck the asphalt.
Raymond parted the curtains. Up the street, alien foot troops fanned out from a boxy covered vehicle. Metal glinted in clawed limbs. While three took up position behind it, one of the beings strode to the picture window of the house two doors down and bashed the butt of a long rifle through the glass. Another team of four broke toward the neighboring house; behind them, four more trample
d the overgrown flowers of the front yard on the way to their gates.
"Oh Jesus," Mia said.
Raymond's head buzzed numbly. "The panic room. Now."
He ran to the back bedroom and the painted steel door set into its wall. The handle wouldn't budge. From outside, metal groaned and clanged against the pavement.
"It's stuck," he said.
"Let me try." Mia bumped him out of the way and pulled with all her strength. With a frustrated shriek, she leaned on the brushed steel handle and rammed her shoulder into the door. "Did you lock this?"
"How would I lock it from the outside?"
"How should I know? I grew up in a trailer, not this ritzy mansion bullshit—" Downstairs, glass cascaded across the stone floors. A Y-shaped vein pulsed on Mia's forehead. She grabbed his hand. "Come on."
She raced for the back deck, closing the door behind them. A soft breeze countered the sunlight washing Raymond's skin. Below the deck, the yard terminated in a waist-high stone fence, cliffs and sea below. He bared his teeth. Even if they could leap clear of the rocks, the water would be no more than a few feet deep.
"Boost me up," Mia whispered. He goggled at her; she slapped him and cradled her hands in example. "Snap out of it and give me a boost!"
He laced his fingers together. She stepped in, steadying herself against the wall as he lifted her, forearms straining, her bare foot secure in his hands. She grabbed the lip of the roof and wriggled her chest and hips up over the edge as he pushed her feet up from below. She turned around and dangled her arm down.
Raymond crouched and jumped. Stucco scraped his fingers. His knuckles strained, supporting his weight as he kicked his legs against the wall. Mia clamped his forearms and heaved. The roof's edge sheared skin from his chest. He got a knee up and rolled on his back, panting. Mia pressed her body to the shallow pitch and army-crawled away from the edge. Muffled footsteps filtered from below.
16
Grass tickled the creature's cloth-wrapped abdomen. A flock of sparrows swooped over the creek. The creature spun, two noodly limbs shooting upright and tracking the vector of the birds' cheeping flight. Walt eased himself off the rock into the cold water. Slick rocks clacked under his soles. He crouched low, submerging himself until the rushing water soaked the back of his head, face upturned to clear his nose. He steadied himself against the rock with one hand and brought his knife to just below the surface.
Grass threshed. A three-fingered, stick-like limb parted the green wall at the bank of the creek. The creature glided forward, limbs splashing in the shallows. Rocks clonked beneath it. Walt's fingers tightened around the knife. The thing tapped the rock he'd sunned on with two brown-gray arms, planted them firm, and leaned its disclike body and bulbous, octopine head over the gurgling water. Walt took a good long look at the ridges of its neck, a supple thing that broadened to a fat stock where it connected to the body, which was shaped like one of the water-smoothed pebbles under his feet. A collar of fine fabric wrapped the base of its neck, flowing into a skintight blue wrap of its body with long holes on both sides to sleeve its several arms. It craned forward, slowly turning the two rubbery arms through a wide arc. The creek jangled.
The arms withdrew. The creature retreated from the rock into the grass and padded back for the clump of trees, disappearing from sight. Walt slipped from the cold water, sun beating his skin, until he could see the back of the creature's head. An instant after he'd risen, the being whirled and tore straight for him.
Walt shouted and warded one arm in front of him, knife hand close to his chest. The thing turned sideways as it closed, sticking a bushel of slapping arms and kicking legs between Walt's body and its head and two noodly arms. A leg struck Walt's shin. He grimaced and slashed at an incoming arm, flaying the tough skin down to its bone. Yellow fluid spattered the grass. The creature made no noise beyond the tapping of its feet on the stones. It picked up a rock in a pair of narrow claws and swung for Walt's head. He ducked, jabbing at its nearest leg. The thing reared up and bulled forward, knocking them both into the water.
The current pulled him downstream. The thing planted its thinner legs between submerged stones, poling along while its flatter tentacles threshed water. It closed on him in moments. He'd kept a death grip on the knife, which he waved in tight, fast flicks at a probing arm. A claw snaked in from the side and grabbed his wrist. Pain circled his arm as it crushed his tendons against his bones. He strained his trapped wrist closer to his chest, extending its arm, and slammed his other palm into its joint.
A nauseating crack shot over the burble of the water. The thing let go of his wrist and paddled backwards against the current, still silent despite its broken bone. Walt leaned into the stream, jogging forward in exaggerated strides to clear his knees of the water, and grabbed a trailing limb. He pulled down hard as he leapt out of the water, leveraging himself onto its back. His knife blade thunked against a hard skull. As arms whipped his back and clubbed the back of his head, he grabbed the creature's neck, dug in with his nails, and stabbed down hard into one wide, unblinking eye.
The thing bucked, spraying white slashes of water to all sides, flinging Walt back into the hustling creek. He tucked his head. His ribs jarred down on a rock, stealing his breath. He thrashed for his footing; before he could stand, the still-writhing body of the thing knocked him off his feet. He plunged under the water, taking an involuntary breath at the cold shock. For a panicked moment he couldn't tell which way was up. Sunlight. Air on his waving arm. He bumbled into a smooth, protruding rock, and, toes slicking over the moss, clambered his naked body up to its damp surface. He coughed, spitting water. Downstream, the slowly tumbling body lodged in the reeds at a bend in the creek.
Once he'd found his breath, Walt laughed.
He waded across the stream and dragged the corpse through the grass to dry land. There, he scanned a full arc of the light woods and meadows and the low mountains behind him. Wind shushed the grass. The stream tinkled. A bird chirred. He went back for his gear and dried himself off and put on pants and socks and shoes. He shouldered his stuff and lugged it back to the body. He laid a pistol on top of his duffel bag, spread out a tarp, selected a butcher knife and a paring knife, and rolled the creature's damp body onto the blue plastic.
He was no doctor. Despite the last few months of sporadic fish and game, he wasn't much of a butcher, either. But he was enough of a mathematician to add two and two, and either the thing in front of him had come from Earth or it hadn't; either some company had been so deep into biotech it was capable of creating humanity-erasing viruses and crab-hybrid monsters, or it had come from outer space, in which case he already had more than a few suspicions about the source of the Panhandler, too. (Though even then, there were other possibilities—if they were aliens, perhaps they were planetary vultures, and had swooped in after their monitors reported mankind was no longer an issue.)
Either way, he knew how to get to the guts of the matter.
He sliced the creature's clothes away from its body, set them aside, then stabbed the butcher knife down hard. Its skin was smooth but tough, resisting the knife like fingernails or hardened leather. Walt leaned into the blade. Clear and yellow goo slimed his hands. He sawed through the skin, knife jarring into unseen bones, some of which he was able to crack by leveraging his weight against them. Sweat beaded his brow and back. At a bone-free spot, he peeled back the hard skin and sliced it away from the membranes beneath.
The inside of the cavity looked like a mass of swollen spaghetti and meatballs colored the yellow of beached kelp and floating in a pot of watery yellow marinara. It smelled no better. He lifted out handfuls of rubbery tubes, knotted here and there by fleshy nodes the size of marbles and tennis balls. Snotty fluid glopped from his hands, pattering onto the tarp. Rubber gloves. He needed to loot some rubber gloves. The tubes and nodes hung by membranes from narrow bones.
Walt moved to the oversized head. Most of it was like the body, tough skin around fibrous lumps, but a third
of the interior, including the eye sockets, was taken up by a bony ball punctured here and there by tube-choked holes. After two minutes of sawing at one of the sockets, his knife had only worn a small notch in the inner skull. He went to the creek, swooshed his hands around the cool water, and returned with a rock the size of two closed fists. The skull smashed on the third blow.
Beneath another membrane, he sorted through a pulpy, semi-solid mush of loosely connected gray-blue matter.
So at least it had a brain. All the rest of its organs, any lungs or kidneys or livers or spleens or anything like that, they were like nothing he'd ever seen before. He didn't want to believe it. Not that he didn't think they existed. He just didn't believe they'd possibly come here. But the nasty yellow muck he was covered in offered only one explanation: the thing he'd killed hadn't come from Earth.
Aliens, then. Aliens. Aliens with a bunch of small nodules instead of obviously vital targets. Headshots, he supposed. At least they had big heads.
He dragged the body into the creek and shoved it away with a long stick. The alien's clothing was spotted with pockets. He found a tin of dried, crumbling food with whiffs of salt and seaweed and rot. A pouch of water that smelled like a distant ocean. A blank pad that wouldn't respond to his touch or voice. A bag of metal balls inscribed with rings of pictographs. A gray, finger-sized tube with a small screen and what he thought might be a touchpad. And a hard rubber case filled with smooth, unyielding cards printed with shimmering figures and abstract icons. He ditched the food and water and added the rest to his bag. Whatever weapon it had been holding in its hands and claws had been lost in the water. He walked upstream and refilled his canteens and jugs.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 16