Friday afternoons, rain or shine, a farmer's market had opened on a side street, selling boxes of strawberries, lemons and limes and oranges, rich green spinach and bunches of dewy cilantro. One van sold potted avocado trees and fat-leafed dragonfruit plants. Mia worked part-time doing reception for a dentist down the block, and when Raymond drove over to pick her up in the late afternoons, sunlight pouring through his windshield so hard he could barely see the road, he'd park, feed the meter, and dawdle down to the market while he waited for work to let her go.
It amazed him they could sell heads of spinach for a dollar apiece, a bin of strawberries for two—less than half what he'd pay at the Ralph's or the Albertsons. As their money bled away, he paced their off-red deck with the half-rotted planks at the far end and willed the patch of yellow grass along the fence to morph into a deep brown field with tidy rows of leafy green. Meanwhile, the weedy stretch of dirt beside the driveway could be the perfect herb garden. It seemed possible, even easy, to grow their own tomatoes, basil, lettuce, and bell peppers, to halve their grocery budget to butter, eggs, and packs of chicken thighs. All for the cost of a few seeds and daily water.
Between the job hunt, fooling around with Photoshop on spec projects, and watching Star Trek streamed over Netflix, he'd never found the time. Instead, most Fridays he bought a twist of spinach for garlic mashed potatoes or a flat of strawberries for crepes, consoling himself with the thought that even two dollars saved per week would add up to a hundred by year's end. Every little difference mattered.
The market was gone now, a dark side street fronted by black-windowed apartments. Dry leaves and garbage littered the sidewalks of the cafes and salons. Metal tables and chairs sat in the open, dotted with heavy layers of rain-spotted dust.
They slunk along the road parallel to Pacific Coast Highway, meeting up with the main street the block before the bike shop. A tattered tarp fluttered over the lot. Dozens of bicycles rested in rows in front of the store, left out during the pandemic, dirt clinging to their stylish, colorful frames. They weren't even chained. Gaps in the rows indicated a few had been stolen, but most of the survivors, like them, must have been concentrating on food and cars and guns and medicine.
Mia wiped a clean line through the dirt coating a basketed bike, revealing a light purple paint job. She smiled and stage-whispered, "Regulators, mount up!"
Raymond found himself a red one, holstering his pistol. He hadn't ridden a bike since he'd gotten his driver's license over a decade ago, and he was afraid he'd spill into the street in a disaster of skinned elbows and torn jeans, but Mia pedaled off without hesitation. After an initial wobble, he rode smoothly.
Cool air whisked past his face, countered by the heat of his muscles. Mia leaned forward and turned off the PCH toward the empty cafes. The low slurp of rubber tires on asphalt was obliterated by the banging roar of sustained automatic fire.
Mia swerved in among the parking meters. "That's coming from the—"
Blue bolts flashed from the beach. A spray of tracers lashed the darkness. More gunfire kicked up, crashing over the surf, ricochets whining. Shouts and screams drifted on the wet air. Fifty yards from Raymond, a silhouette popped up from the stairs leading to the beach. Before the woman took two steps, a lance of blue light knocked her to the ground.
"We've got to get out of here," Mia said. "Like ten minutes ago."
The wounded woman's groan was riddled with pain. She rose to her hands and knees, a black lump, then collapsed back to the pavement.
Raymond gestured. "She's hurt."
"By the same laser that will hurt us if we stay!"
"We can't just leave her," he said. "Not when we can help."
He pushed off the curb and pedaled with all he had. Dead ahead, blue beams cleaved the night.
18
He flung the pad and the cards and the metal balls into the weeds. Above, the whining vessel banked, bleeding altitude. Walt stood in an open slope of gray dirt, yellow grass sprigs, and short green bushes. A series of bluffs staggered the flatlands a half mile away. The road lay a couple hundred yards in the opposite direction. No help there, either; more scrubby high desert bordered by dry mountains. No plants rose higher than mid-thigh. No buildings at all. Nowhere to hide.
The small black ship made a wide semicircle above the highway. Searching for their lost friend? Seeking vengeance on the one who'd killed it? Whatever the question, Walt's death was the answer. He ran for the tree-speckled bluffs, bogged down by the heavy bags bouncing on his back. Over his shoulder, the ship floated less than a mile above the road. Walt swore, skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust. He ducked the bags off his back, slung them behind a clump of bushes, and sprinted for the bluffs.
Stupid move, hanging on to the dead alien's stuff. He'd kept it partly as a trophy, partly with the hope that, with time and the right equipment, he could learn from it, spy on their communications network or track their movements or download some freaky alien porn to shame them out of the Solar System. Really, his thinking hadn't been practical at all, drawing from the primal instinct to take the possessions of those you killed. Possessions that had clearly included a tracking device of some kind. Assuming the aliens were capable of any emotion at all, Walt guessed their reaction to finding their friend's gear in a human's hands would involve powerful ray guns and attack-tripods.
After two thousand miles of walking, he was in willow-trim shape. He loped through the dust, breathing easily. Still, the bluffs stood impossibly far. The whining engines fell silent. The ship touched down on the road on insectlike legs. A portal rolled open. Walt stumbled, arms flailing, and put his eyes forward. If they caught him before he reached the low trees in the folds of the bluffs, there wasn't much he could do. He had a pistol belted to his hip and a jackknife in his pocket. That was it. That's what he'd have to defend himself against their guns or lasers or rockets or hypernuclear black-hole bombs. But it didn't matter: he would shoot at them until his clip ran out, and then, if he could get close enough, he would stab them, and if they took his knife he would punch and claw and bite their tough smooth skin.
Not so long ago, the understanding he would die would have caused him to question whether there was any worth to resisting a foregone conclusion. If his death were assured, better to subvert fate by taking control of the method, by letting the aliens shoot him, or better yet, by shooting himself, pulling the trigger with his middle finger.
Fuck that. If they were going to kill him, they'd have to root him out of the trees. Blow up the whole hill. Until the onset of the blackness, he would be shooting. Stabbing. Punching.
He charged across the desert field. At the road, four aliens milled around their ship, twiddling things too small to see. As if his looking at them had caused them to look back, one of the aliens stiffened in a universal posture of wary surprise and assessment. Walt spurred himself harder. He'd be at the scrabbly trees in less than a minute. By the time he glanced back, the aliens had left the road behind, running after him on smooth, many-legged strides.
Walt clattered into the loose rocks that blanketed the slope. It was steep going, and not far to his left the bluff simply rose in a sheer cliff, but here it was runnable, scablike swathes of broken rock between brambly green bushes and crumbly dirt. He leaned forward, balancing with his hand. The ground leveled into yellowing grass and pokey trees with pale green leaves. Another couple hundred yards on, the ground fell away at an unseen angle. Probably empty desert beneath. Walt pulled in behind a tree, gun in hand, and shrank against its thorny trunk.
Below, the aliens glided across the plain. They stopped at the spot where he'd tossed away the dead one's gear, then halted a second time when they came to his bags. While one stared motionless in his general direction, the other three spread out, poking among the dirt and the weeds. Walt panted, shirt sweat-stuck to his back. The nights had been cold lately—the signs for the previous towns boasted higher elevations than populations—but the days were still hot, borderline scorching.
His mouth felt as dry as the bark scraping the side of his face. Far across the field, one of the aliens lowered itself and scuttled in the dust. A few yards away, a second reached down with a thick tentacle and hefted Walt's duffel onto its flat back. A third dangled his backpack from a sticklike arm. The group reconvened, waving their arms at each other in quick, flicking patterns as graceful as a swimming fish or a martial artist practicing his forms. With some consensus reached, they started back toward the road. A moment later, the one who'd been watching the bluff turned its back and followed.
Walt simmered as they hauled his things back to the ship. Had they taken his gear out of base cruelty, expecting him to now die in this dry place? Out of clinical curiosity, hoping to study his equipment and extrapolate the fundamentals of human survival? Out of a shrimplike fastidiousness that didn't allow artificial objects to lie in a natural setting? The fact he could only speculate, and therefore didn't know just how much to hate them, somehow made it all the more frustrating.
They took their sweet alien time getting back to their ship and even longer taking off. By the time the black vessel lifted into the sky, the sun was nearly touching the western mountains. Walt waited to move until he could no longer see the ship's dark oval or hear its high engines.
Not a single one of his things had been dropped or discarded. The only thing left behind was a bunch of shallow round holes where they'd tromped around. Yellow grass wavered in the waxing breeze and waning light. Already, the wind raised the hairs on his bare arms. He had no idea how far he was from the next town. They'd been few and far between lately, sun-withered things full of trailers and weedy lots. He passed just two or three a day, and they'd been thinning. Walt had the impression he was about to head into a true American wilderness where you might go dozens of miles without encountering a single home or gas station. He'd passed a small town earlier that day; if he backtracked along the road, he might be able to make it in five or six hours.
It would lose him a day of travel. Not that he had some neurosurgery appointment awaiting him in Los Angeles. Getting there in January would be no different from getting there in December. Did he have to keep going at all? Like pausing on a magazine ad before flipping to the next story, he entertained the thought of stopping, of finding a house back in the suburbs of Albuquerque and just...staying. But he knew he would hate it, rooting through the houses of the dead for boxes of Rice Krispies and rolls of toilet paper, returning home to watch from the window while the shadows stretched across the street. He had a goal in LA. He had a goal, and however arbitrary it might be, he was enjoying its pursuit.
He headed for the rising western road. He pushed harder than his standard pace, meaning to make the most of these last minutes of light; without the heavy bags, it felt easy, oddly fun, like leaving work early when no one will notice. He'd left his coat in the bag and the night was cool and getting cooler. The sun slotted into a notch in the mountains and sunk into another part of the world. He felt like a lone hunter, keenly aware that his survival was now on the line. He hadn't had such a strong sense of purpose in ages. Possibly, he never had—he needed to find food, water, and shelter, and the only way to do it was to walk on. Meaning through purpose: that was the lesson of the end of the world.
This feeling lasted until the cool became the cold of the high desert. Walt was tired and thirsty. He envisioned himself lying in the dirt beside the road, weeds prickling his bare arms, woken repeatedly by his own shivers, the gusting breeze, the furtive rustles of rodents seeking seeds. With no idea whether the next town was thirty miles away or just around the next bend, he began to make deals with himself, promising to lie down and try to get some sleep in another half hour, and when that half hour turned out to be a dull stretch of empty moonlit roadside, to go for another ten minutes, and when those ten minutes went by, just another five, because anyone can walk for five minutes—until finally, with an audible sigh, he dropped off the road into the dust, found a rock-free patch of dirt, and balled up, one arm pillowing his head, the other tucked inside his shirt for warmth.
His stomach gurgled. Whenever he woke, which was often, his tongue was so dry he had to wipe it around his teeth until it no longer felt like the arm of a desiccated starfish. After a little less than three hours, he was shivering too hard to go back to sleep. He got up, stretched, silently cursed out the aliens, and walked on, jogging intermittently once it grew light enough to see the road was clear. When it warmed up, he napped in the partial shade of a waist-high bush that smelled like pollen and dried-out sage.
The land rolled on, bristly yellow weeds over scabby gray dirt. Walt was already starting to think about slicing off parts of the bushes and gnawing them for moisture or trying to shoot a rabbit with his pistol and drink the blood. He should have carried three bags, not two, with the third a fanny pack or neck-pouch filled with the critical essentials: bottled water, high-energy food like fruit and nuts and dried meat, a couple of lighters and bandages, an extra box of bullets, and a thermal blanket. Enough to keep him healthy and focused for a couple days if he ever again had to ditch the rest of his gear.
Assuming he lived, he'd get right on that.
He hadn't even thought twice about drinking his own urine before he turned a bend into a spread of houses down the hill. An obvious main street, a tic-tac-toe board of side roads, a few splashes of persistent green among the shriveled yellow lawns and wind-driven dust. A place where a few hundred humans had once lived among the luxuries and conveniences of the era.
A 76 station waited at the edge of town, gas prices fixed at $3.19 for 87-grade. A dust devil twirled in from the neighboring desert, spinning itself out over the hot pavement. For a minute, Walt just waited, letting his senses sense and his instincts instinct. He crossed the lot and stepped inside.
The shelves had been emptied. Completely. The fridges, too, even of the rotting, clotted milk cartons he'd expected to find there. The trash cans offered the butt of a hot dog, now reduced to a foam of dry brown mold. The bathroom key was still under the register. Walt went inside the dark room to try the faucets just for fun. They didn't work.
A small local supermarket sat down the block, shopping carts rusting beside the cars, front windows smashed out. The front rows were just as empty as the gas station. He walked into the gloom of the back of the store, shuffling his feet, trailing one arm along the dusty shelves. Of the few objects he found—packaged rubber gloves, rawhide dog bones, boxes of toothpicks and straws—none were edible or potable. Something like frustration expanded from the center of his chest, squeezing his organs, but the emotion had a rawer, wriggling edge to it: the bone-deep animal panic that he might never taste food or water again. He found three boxes of something powdery, flour, possibly, or muffin mix, and shuffled for better light. Nope. Baking powder. Son of a bitch.
"Hold up there." A man's voice echoed among the scoured aisles. Walt dropped his boxes and went for his pistol. A hammer clicked. Through the sun-dazzle on his dark-adjusted eyes, Walt made out a man's silhouette, his arms extended, a pack clinging to his shoulders. "What do you think you're doing?"
It took two tries before Walt could speak around his dry throat. "Trying to find something to drink."
"You won't," the man said. "We took it."
"From the whole town?"
The man nodded. Walt could see a little better now, well enough to make out the man's brambly brown beard, his slight paunch, his t-shirt and cargo shorts.
"That seems excessive," Walt said.
"Not when nobody's making anything new." The man flicked his pistol. "Set down your gun and walk out the door."
Walt dropped his cocked elbows a couple inches. "I just want some water. Something to eat. Just enough to get me to the next town."
"Got anything to trade?"
He started a mental inventory of his packs before remembering he had nothing but his clothes and the contents of those clothes' pockets. The aliens had once more taken everything from him: first Vanessa, then his
family and his friends, and as if that hadn't been enough, as a final measure they'd swung by in person to take away his food and his water, his sleeping bag and cookware and all the rest. He smiled. He knew he wasn't being personally persecuted, that he wasn't the human Job to their alien Jehovah, but he couldn't help feeling that way. Honestly, at some point it had crossed the line, become too much and too absurd to maintain his anger towards. He could still feel it there, deep down, but right now what he really wanted to do was laugh.
"No," he said. "Lost everything but what you see."
"Then put down your gun, walk out those doors, and get on down the road."
"How about you be a proper host and give me something to drink? That way I won't stink up your nice little town when my body collapses on Main Street."
The bearded man shook his head. "Don't make me ask a third time."
Walt squinted. The man's voice was young; eyes adjusting to the sunlight, Walt saw his face was, too. Not any older than himself. No doubt a local—no traveler would have pitched a permanent tent in this desolate place—one of at least two survivors, because he'd said "we," but no more than five, ten at the very outside, given Panhandler survival rates. Walt's gut said it was fewer. Possibly just the kid and his girlfriend. He had just enough to lose to be afraid to risk leaving this place in search of somewhere better.
A town's worth of food between two people. Laying claim to it by virtue of their ability to take it—so if they refused to share, with himself in danger of dying as a result, did that allow him to just take from them what he needed? He set this kettle of thought on the backburner—he did possess something he doubted they had, actually, way out in this nowhereland.
"I've got information."
The kid's pistol drooped fractionally. "About what?"
"The Panhandler. Where it came from."
"The Midwest, Iowa or somewhere. Some big pig farm where they grew piglets in vats."
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 18