This time, he traveled overland, paralleling the road from a distance of a couple hundred yards, skirting Albuquerque and the stretch of small towns that followed through the gently rising desert. Hostile aliens. Just that much more proof for how fucked up reality was. He didn't see how this changed his goals. Aside, that is, from the fact the invaders would probably nuke the shit out of the cities, or, if they were environmentally conscious, fire- or neutron- or unimaginably-advanced-alien-technology-bomb them. Then again, unless they were comically incompetent, they would have taken care of that before romping around the New Mexican wilderness. Whatever had happened to Los Angeles must have already gone down.
He tromped among the sage and yellow grass. As he descended from the foothills, the heat ascended. He napped under the shade of trees in a draw between two hills, troubled by flies, moving on in the just-warm dusk.
Aliens. Motherfucking aliens. As a kid, he'd immersed himself in Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke, all the classics, warm possibilities where the future was positive and our stellar neighbors meant us no ill-will. (Not that Heinlein, with his killer bugs and mind-controlling slugs, envisioned a hand-holding galactic UN. Still, beneath the warfare was the sense we would prevail, if only we tried hard enough and held true to ourselves as individuals and a people. Even in the barbarian-ravaged future of Asimov, the ingenuity of brilliant men carried the day.) He'd internalized this positivism—or they'd encapsulated his inborn instincts, who could be sure—but while these future-forward feelings lingered through high school, resisting the constant rot of fact and experience, this warmth had eroded during college like the wave-worn pilings below a dock, a process hidden from his higher mind. Even then, he'd paced the unsteady surface, ignoring the creakiness of the boards under his mental feet.
Vanessa's death had swept it away like a meteor-driven tsunami. In the psychological wreckage, the revelation of aliens, of other life, was nothing more than the ridiculous gilding of the absurd lily, the duh-duh coal brought before drooling, crazy-eyed Newcastle. When the social structure of the supposed greatest nation on Earth was one of under-your-nose slavery where 1% of the country owned half its wealth, what surprise was it that an alien race would want to destroy us for their own selfish ends? It was as natural as the dust around him or the dry, nostril-clogging pollen of the desert night. Of course the aliens wanted him dead. Who didn't?
In sharp contrast to this daily horror—and, in a way, making it all the worse for offering a glimmer of something better—were the balloon trips. The couple times a year when his parents took him up in the vehicles of their business were the only days he voluntarily woke before dawn. He sipped coffee from a thermos while his mom drove them to the grassy field where the first sunlight cast the surrounding trees in shades of gray. Walt shivered in his jacket while they filled the balloon with cold air from a fan. When his dad held the balloon's mouth clear while his mom finally lit the burner, waves of heat washed his hands and face. The bright Dacron swelled, tautening in the pink dawn until the fabric lifted clear, swallowing the sky overhead.
His dad said the same thing every time they stepped into the rickety wicker basket: "Welcome to the Cloudward Express, now offering one-way travel to Heaven if you lean too far over the side. All aboard!"
His dad had started saying that when Walt was just a little kid—possibly before he was born—but even once he'd grown old enough to consider it hokey as hell, he never rolled his eyes. The acts of preparing the basket and filling the balloon were somehow spiritual, a cleansing, fiery ritual that matched the red of the rising sun. And then the balloon lifted, lurching him up in a flimsy shower-sized basket held together by ropes and crowded with two other people going about the business of keeping them afloat, and if they let the bag get too hot, or he tripped over the side, he'd be dead just like that.
But he didn't care. Not when the green grass lay so far below. Not minutes later when the roads ribboned the woods and the houses clustered the roads and he could see the Atlantic like a field of glinting mercury. It was the stillness of it all, a long, centered silence broken by tweeting birds, far-off cars, his dad's sporadic jokes, and the occasional whuff of the flame, an interruption like a watchdog rousting from sleep before settling its head back between its paws. More silence, more stillness.
In these times, maybe two hours every three months, Walt felt a simple, fragile peace. Peace and an ache inside his chest: what made the time in the balloon so special and every other moment so hard?
Soon, the balloon began to descend. With the spell snapped, his parents chattered about what they had to do for the rest of the day, pinging him with questions about school and girls and his friends. He answered from that automatic place in his head, silently pleading for the balloon to rise again. A few minutes later, the wicker basket brushed the ground.
Three days and seventy or eighty miles from the creek in the woods, a keening whine pierced the sky. Walt hunkered in the yellow brush and set his bags in the dirt. He squinted at the blue sky, eyes watering, until he picked out a black speck curving through a wide circle miles overhead.
No real cover. Just scrubby green plants clinging close to the dirt and scraggly brown brush he'd lose a few layers of skin trying to hide beneath. He tucked in beside a dry, tangy shrub, resolving to wait until the flier headed away.
It banked through another circle. By the next circuit, Walt could no longer deny it: the ship was moving in a tightening downward spiral, a black oblong sweeping the desert for—what? Survivors? The person who'd killed the alien at the stream? How would they possibly know where to look?
His heart went cold. Too angry to swear, he unzipped the pocket of the duffel where he'd stored the dead alien's things.
17
Glass smashed inside the house. Raymond pressed his back to the roof, digging in his bare heels and pushing himself up from the ledge. Mia grabbed his wrist. A scout ship whined from up the hill. Beneath them, hard feet thunked stone and hardwood. Dishes shattered across the floor. The search moved with methodical swiftness, footsteps and the clatter of dropped objects moving from one room to the next. If the aliens spoke, Raymond couldn't hear them. Sweat slicked his palms and waistband, pooling in the small of his back. Aliens tromped up the steps, muffled by carpet, fanning into the bedroom directly beneath them. The soldiers paused.
With a soft rumble, the door to the deck slid open.
An alien clicked onto the wooden planks. It strode to the railing, scanning the silent yard with its oversized eyes, two thin limbs waving over its head. Raymond's foot slipped, scuffing over the rough roof. Mia's fingers clamped his wrist. The alien didn't budge. It raised a smooth, curved object like a buttonless remote to its head, one tentacle twitching near its waist, and eyed the rich brown dirt of the tilled and weeded garden. It put the remote away and walked inside the house.
The creatures thumped around for a while longer, opening doors and knocking things onto the carpet, then clacked down the front steps into the driveway. Mia scooted to the edge, legs dangling, flipped around so her stomach faced the roof, and dropped to the deck with a light thump. Raymond followed her down. She crept to the landing above the stairs. The front door hung open. Chairs had been overturned, closets opened, coats and shoes slung over the carpet. They retreated to the bedroom and hunkered below the windows beside the bed. Scouts whined across the skies. Troops clumped down the street. Once, gunfire crackled downhill, followed by a single sustained scream.
The sun sunk below the waves. The dome of its light retreated with it, shrinking into the blue, a wall of navy darkness advancing on its heels. At nightfall, Mia rose, knees popping.
"I need a drink."
"I might need two," he said. She bolted the front door while he mixed warm Jim Beam with warm ginger ale. He passed her a glass and sipped his, vaguely troubled. There were no ice cubes clinking around inside his glass. He still hadn't gotten used to that. They put the scattered coats and shoes away, cleaned up the stuffing ripped from the co
uch in one of the living rooms. The house carried an odd, tidal pool smell, like drying kelp and withered mussels. Mia spritzed lavender air freshener while he opened windows.
"Well?" she said as they sat in bed, curtains drawn. A single candle flickered near the door.
"Well what?"
"They just went house to house. You still want to stay?"
"Maybe they'll consider the neighborhood all clear."
"And maybe this was just a preliminary sweep and next time they'll come back with alien Rhoombas made to vacuum up blood."
Raymond didn't know what to say. If the aliens stayed, they'd be fools to stay themselves. Those things could come back any minute. Start dropping bombs. Chemicals. Leaving carried dangers of its own, but if they could get a toehold somewhere remote, a cabin in the Rockies, say, they'd probably be able to live for years without being discovered by the aliens. Possibly their entire lifetimes. The creatures hadn't brought a planet-wrecking fleet; he hadn't seen any superweapons; it even seemed plausible the combined military of Earth could have driven them back, if only every nation in the world hadn't been wiped out by the Panhandler. The aliens simply wouldn't have the resources to scour every last human from the planet. Not in this generation. So long as the survivors clung to their nooks and crannies, insect-like, and didn't try to bite or sting the new dog on the block, it seemed plausible they'd simply be left alone.
Deep down inside, he'd already made the decision to leave, but something was holding it back, like his intentions were a bubble trapped under tar. Inevitably, it would rise to the surface, but it was still working its way through the layers of his brain. He couldn't say when it would burst free.
Leaving meant giving up everything they'd worked for. Handing over the few scraps of green they'd collected from the soil, the few jugs of blue water they'd gathered from the sky and sea. Leaving would mean leaving their home, their last real link to the old world, to their old lives, a world capable of creating iPods and Charleston Chews and new episodes of Lost. Driving off into the wild yonder would mean accepting, finally, that it was all over. Whatever the future held, it would be nothing like the one he'd expected to live into old age with.
Dumb as it was, then, to want to stay in a place where alien beings were actively seeking to unroot the human remainders, he couldn't help it. He wasn't ready. His brain was still clearing the path for his emotions to follow.
"We'll stay prepared," he said. "If they leave again, we'll drive off. We'll head for the Rockies."
He meant it as a stall. As the virus had proved, everything could change in the span of days. The American army could arrive in force and blast the aliens into thundering rubble. The creatures could take a look around, consider humanity sufficiently ruined, and blast off to destroy another civilization in star systems unknown. Or announce the whole thing had been one big misunderstanding—who knew. Nobody, that's who, and that was the point. Whatever they believed today could be turned on its head tomorrow.
"What if they don't go?" Mia traced a smiley face in the thin condensation on her glass; he'd moved the whiskey and soda to the deck, where it had cooled compared to the warm indoors. "What if they keep searching?"
"Then we'll leave."
"Not by car. They're attracted to them or something."
"So we escape on bikes. Or via rowboat. Or use these big fleshy things dangling from our hips."
She took a drink, swished it around her mouth. "There's a bike store down on the PCH. Near the Thai place."
"I know. You've wanted one of those bikes ever since we moved here."
She grinned, swatting at him drunkenly. "A purple one."
"I want red." He tapped his teeth. "Now there's just the small matter of getting to them without being zapped into a small pile of ash."
Alien ships patrolled the skies from then on out, their low rumbles and high shrieks bursting the clear air by day and slicing through the hillside fog by night. He doubted they'd be able to pick out two people slipping through the night on foot to the bike shop—the things hadn't noticed the two of them hiding out on the roof, after all—but the possibility was paralyzing. As was holing up in their house all day, sneaking out under cover of dark to water the wilted bell peppers or pick a little cilantro to add flavor to food they could no longer cook over an open fire.
Drop ships came and went, ferrying soldiers to cities up and down the bay. Even after the carrier departed, the smaller craft remained, buzzing in and out of LAX, cleansing neighborhoods Raymond had never visited. Staying had been a mistake. The house, the yard, the garden, the ocean view, that wasn't what made their home a home. It was the freedom they'd had. The simple, unobstructed life they'd built for themselves. Cooped up and scared, they didn't have a home. They had a cage.
Like that, the bubble burst free. He was ready to leave.
A mountain in Colorado. They'd steal a couple bikes, rig them up with baskets loaded with as much food, water, and medical supplies as they could carry, and pedal out of the city under cover of darkness. Beyond the aliens' sight, they'd find a car and forage for supplies along the way. Grab a house in a town in the foothills of the Rockies, somewhere out of the way, of little interest to genocidists, and wait out the winter there, building up supplies, scouting the mountainsides for cabins, ideally near a stream or a lake where they could irrigate a garden and maybe even do a little fishing. Depending on the violence of the snows, they might be able to put in a bit of work on the cabin in the meantime. In the spring, they would move in and get to work chopping wood, planting seeds, digging a hole to store food and keep it cool. They weren't likely to be entirely self-sufficient by the winter after that, but they could augment what they grew and caught with preserved food rustled up from the town below.
That was the plan. It was a good plan. It was practical in a way that appealed to Raymond's sense of order, based on few assumptions (that the aliens wouldn't notice two people on bikes; that they'd be able to find regular supplies of gasoline along the way; that they'd be able to traverse a snowy mountain well enough to find a cabin before spring). It was elegant and flexible. Disasters could happen, of course, alien attacks or car crashes or blizzards, but these things weren't worth worrying about. They were too large, too total. Besides, they just weren't all that likely. Things normally went to plan, and when they didn't, they had a way of working themselves out regardless.
The one problem with the plan was he didn't know the way to Colorado. They had no maps besides one of the LA freeway system tucked into the Charger's glove box. The internet was long gone. He didn't even know, strictly speaking, where Colorado was—he knew it was one of those square states, but was it above Nevada? Under Wyoming? Somewhere to the north and east, that much he knew. And he supposed that was all he needed to know. Once they got out of the city, they'd head northeasterly, pick up maps at a rest stop or tourist center or glove box somewhere along the way. Things would work out. It made Raymond feel bad to think about, but there was simply too much stuff abandoned by the dead for him and Mia to starve along the way, no matter how many times they had to backtrack on their way to Colorado.
That left just one other hole: getting the bikes. Prior to being eradicated by disease, the citizens of the beach cities had been health nuts, cycling along the strand that bordered the beach, walking dogs on the esplanade sidewalks, sometimes combining the two, terriers and poodles trotting on leashes alongside muscly-legged men ensconced in their bikes. With near certainty, they'd be able to find a couple bikes in a garage somewhere down the street. But Mia didn't like the idea of breaking into random houses. It'd be noisy, attention-grabbing. Who knew how long it would take? Raymond nodded, citing the possibility the aliens had left monitoring devices behind, or traps, or other incidental viruses. They knew precisely where the bike shop was. It was no more than two and a half miles away. Walking the back streets, they could be there within 45 minutes, then bike back. The whole thing would be quick and simple and clean. Much more so than breaking into one
garage after another.
They left for the shop that night, dressed in black, pistols in hand, a hammer and a pry bar dangling from Raymond's hips. A pair of binoculars swung from Mia's neck. They walked down the hill at a swift pace, swishing through the grass under the palms in the green strip that lined the road. Something rattled a can down the street, startling them. Raymond crouched beside a palm's rough, pinecone-like bark. Mia held her pistol to her chest. In the moonlight, a skunk hopped into the gutter, waddling, its brushy tail held high.
"I should shoot it on principle," Mia whispered.
"No way. They may be our last line of defense against the aliens. Bet you they've never even heard of tomato juice."
His heart rate calmed by the time the steep hillside street fed into the esplanade. Waves struck the beach in great and sudden bursts. Raymond frowned; out to sea, a single white light rose and fell on the dark water.
"Come on," Mia said.
Yellow two-story apartments fronted the road toward PCH. The lightest of breezes sifted the palms. Ahead, a row of silent people stood along the median. Raymond jolted, blood cold. The illusion quickly resolved into parking meters. A few cars remained untouched in their parking spots. How long it would take them to rust away in the steady daytime ocean winds? He stumbled on something light and clattering. Bones gleamed whitely from stiff clothes, connected by dry strings of flesh, the rest rotted away or eaten. It had no smell. He swallowed down his dinner of cold canned ravioli.
Six months ago, these few square blocks had been one of the most pleasant spaces in a city that was almost nothing but pleasant, a pedestrian-friendly collection of sidewalk cafes, shoe and dress shops, and quiet, tasteful bars. Walking down the sidewalk, Raymond had smelled pepper-roasted lamb, buttery calamari, the hot metal of the heating lamps the restaurants turned on to combat the evening breezes.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 17