That was a video game. You could memorize it. It didn't adapt to you. Eventually, if you played it enough, memorizing each of its obstacles, you would beat it, no matter how many times your toad died along the way.
He glanced at Mia, the contrast between her delicate face and the taut muscles beneath her sun-browned skin, and thought, suddenly, of kidnapping her, conking her out and running away to live in an igloo to train penguins to bring them fish through the winter.
"What are you smiling about?" she said.
"Alternate realities."
This, too, was truer than the glibness that had spurred it. No matter how fast the obstacles came or how often they changed, he couldn't stop playing when the game was the only chance he had to see every last one of those things dead. As for Mia and Raymond, he was less certain. In a small, strange way, he'd been disappointed when they told him they were in with his mini-resistance. He'd wanted them to go somewhere—the Caribbean, Brazil, the outlands of Patagonia. Anywhere but LA.
Instead, Raymond said they'd given it a lot of thought, and at the end of the day, they'd decided living like there's no future would only guarantee it. Or something equally hokey and cliched, who could remember such things? He'd even tried to talk them out of it, told them they didn't owe him, humanity, or anyone else a damned thing, that when happiness slows up enough for you to catch it, you grab it with both hands and lock it in your closet. Mia had just given him this look that only a woman can give a man and told him he'd watched too much Die Hard. Well, what can you do. You can't force a person to not go ambush nightmarish killers from beyond the stars.
After the success at the house, they repeated their trap in a Beverly Hills radio station, replacing the smoking chimney with a broadcast signal and the pigeons with two goats they found cropping the grass of an elementary school. They roamed through and lived in the subway tunnels—that LA had a subway was both news and hilarious to Walt—camping in the cavernous gloom at the base of the stairs, retreating to the platforms with candles and flashlights to sleep, stirred at night by the skitter of rats and the sudden panic that they lived in a concrete cave that smelled like mold and stagnant water and that if their lights burnt out they'd have to stumble through total darkness while their hands trailed along the cold tile walls. But it was safe, inasmuch as anything was these days. Anna watched from a rooftop of an art deco apartment, binoculars clamped to her eyes, walkie-talkie in hand, while Walt led David and Mia to plant two IEDs—David and Otto had combined forces to gin these up—at the entrance to the Staples Center, where they'd seen pairs of squid visit for reasons that probably had nothing to do with basketball.
And then, like that, the missions dried up. Not for want of waiting or watching. That, aside from occasional midnight scavenger runs from the tunnels, was essentially all they did. But because the aliens disappeared. Not the ships; those still scorched the sky on a daily basis. Their base at LAX was only growing, too. Walt spent long hours watching the creatures erecting their cone-houses and milling around, but he couldn't think of a way to tackle the airport that wouldn't result in a lemming-like display of self-destruction. It was the foot patrols which had stopped. The only time when the aliens were vulnerable to six people on foot armed with hand-lasers and equally silent bows and arrows.
"They got wise," Otto said, a dim hulk on the candlelit subway platform. "They may look like dog vomit, but they ain't dumb."
Raymond paced the edges of the light. His limp was almost gone. "It was working, wasn't it? So what do we do?"
"Draw 'em out."
"How's that?" Walt forked up a cold meatball. "Parachute naked into LAX?"
"I thought you were the idea man, idea man."
"If they've wised up to us picking them off, they'll wise up to us drawing them out to pick them off."
Mia tugged her blanket around her shoulders. "Do you think we should stop?"
"I say we bomb them," Anna said. "See how they like it."
Despite the darkness, Otto squinted. "Push came to shove, I could fly us a helicopter. Doubt I'd even have to remember how to land it."
"Are those automated now?" David frowned. "I didn't think autopilots had progressed past in-flight duties and...oh. You're laughing."
"Other ideas?" Walt said.
"Sabotage?" David said. "It would require access to their ships."
Anna rubbed her nose. "Poison them. Just poison the shit out of them."
"With what?" Otto gestured to the empty rails beyond the light. "You got a spare truck of Martian Big Macs down that tunnel?"
"Did we conclude they eat people? We can find corpses, fill the corpses with poison, and leave them in the open. The rest takes care of itself."
"They're not going to eat bodies off the sidewalk!" Mia said. "Would you?"
"I prefer my meat freshly killed through humane methods. But these creatures appear crustacean in nature, from which we might conclude they are not only carrion-eaters, but—"
"We don't know they eat people," Walt said through a mouthful of marinara. "Think better than you're thinking right now."
"Why don't we keep doing what we're doing?" Raymond glanced around the candlelight. "I haven't even gotten out there yet. How do we know the patrols won't come back tomorrow?"
Otto palmed his gray stubble. "The fact you want to go to war tells me you've never been in one."
"You have?" He raised his brows at Otto's nod. "Which one?"
"Which one you think? I look young enough to have been plunking camel jockeys? I'm talking about the jungle. Churned clay. Socks that never dry out." He drew a long breath, puffing his chest. Walt should have guessed he was a Vietnam vet, and a specific kind at that: he who thinks final authority in all matters rests with those few who'd been at Khe Sanh or Hamburger Hill. "I'll tell you something," Otto went on. "One day I'm on recon with a roughneck named Samms. The sun's starting to go down, which you don't like, because it's still hot as a dog's mouth and meanwhile the night-bugs are starting to make so much noise you couldn't hear a Panzer brigade sneaking up on you. The shadows, too. Fronds that could be men or their guns. You see everything and nothing and the only reason you don't head straight back with a false all-clear is the guilt of walking the others into the unknown.
"We reach the edge of a clearing, Samms and me, and the sun comes back. It's yellow on the green grass and the brown water. Down the way, a dozen VC with AKs are yelling at unarmed civilians and kids. I don't understand a word of what the civilians are saying back but you can tell they're scared. That break in the voice means the same in any language. It's open field between us and them and Samms and me know we can't get any closer without getting plunked.
"They're arguing for a while, the soldiers and one rice-skimmer, and then one of the men with the guns gets bored and he shoots the farmer. We're far enough away it's a second between when the farmer drops into the muck and when we hear the report. The other civilians—there must be forty of them, fifty—take off across the sopping fields. Mud's splashing their knees. The soldiers just stroll after them like they just finished a nap. No hurry at all. After the civilians have made a hundred yards, we see why.
"Across the field, there's a barb wire fence. The woman and the kids are streaming into the fence and they're screaming and tearing themselves apart trying to squirm to the other side. Caught in the spikes, the soldiers walk right up to them and shoot them dead. Less than a minute after the first farmer got shot, the field is quiet and the barb wire is heavy with the bodies."
Otto leaned back from the circle of candlelight, shoulders sagging like a weary bear. "Samms and I had tried to help, we'd be two more bodies in the field. Samms knew it. I knew it. But every day since I know I should have tried. I should have given everything to stop those monsters at the wire."
Walt scowled down the gloomy tunnel. The old man was ready to die. Probably, he was just as ready to seize command if Walt decided to turn back or if the aliens persisted in staying beyond their reach. He supposed they we
re all doomed anyway; whether they died tomorrow or two years from now, there was no stopping the enemy. Otto was too war-sure. David, too theoretical; Anna, too scattered; Raymond and Mia, too—domestic. They'd killed a few aliens together, sure, but it was too fantastical to go on.
Something was coming. After moving in together after college, Vanessa had adopted a six-week-old chihuahua, an all-black female with floppy bat ears and round black eyes. He'd resisted the move, as much as he could—she'd brought it home without a word of warning, walking through the door with a velvety little thing that could hardly run without falling down—but had wound up serving as its primary caregiver on the long nights while she auditioned, rehearsed, then unwound in a Village bar. That meant housebreaking. He laid down newspapers, even the diaper-like puppy pads that were supposed to convince dogs to go in one spot, but on countless occasions he looked up from a Mets article on his laptop to find the little dog squatting on the middle of the carpet, urine dribbling from its vagina, its black eyes so blankly stupid he wanted to crush the thing in his hands until it stopped squealing. His anger was so thorough, so mind-erasing, he had to count out loud until it boiled away.
Here they were, six little puppies piddling across Los Angeles. The force that smashed them would be furious.
* * *
It began to rain. It continued to rain. It rained until water spilled down the subway steps and sluiced onto the tracks, forcing them deeper into the tunnels. They jugged all the water they could, took impromptu showers with soap and shampoo looted from the smashed-out CVS on the corner. David constructed an elaborate filtration device from charcoal, sand, and a trash can with a drain punched through its side. Anna wandered back from a midnight run to Home Depot to seed carrots and lettuce in the sidewalk planter. Otto watched with mustached disapproval from the bottom of the steps where he spent every waking minute ensuring he'd see the aliens before they saw him.
Walt doubted the man had to worry. They hadn't seen alien foot patrols for three weeks. Even the aerial presence had lessened, as if the invaders were equally discouraged by the ceaseless rain. Walt had waited for them to relax their guard or for another strategy to emerge, but there existed a hypothetical point where waiting would backfire—when reinforcements would arrive from the stars, or the aliens began breeding, or humanity simply lost the numbers and will to fight back. He wandered the platforms, flashlight in hand, in search of ideas. Instead, he turned a corner and found Mia hastily wrapping a towel around her lithe, damp, candle-shadowed body.
Water dripped from her dark hair. "You'd think I could find some privacy in the LA subway even before everyone else died."
"Didn't know this was the ladies' room."
"Now that you do, will that make you more or less likely to come back?"
"I'd rather not start making enemies with humans, too."
"Sounds smart." She slicked back her hair, pattering water on the concrete. "What are you doing down here?"
He kept his eyes on her face. "Thinking."
"Well, sorry to interrupt you."
"Who says I stopped?"
She smiled, eyebrows puzzled. "When I start shivering in a few seconds, it's cold, not because—"
Footsteps rasped down the platform. Adrenaline jolted through Walt's solar plexus—he envisioned driving his flashlight into the alien's throat—but then a candle wobbled into view, followed by Raymond. He frowned at Mia's towel, the bucket of soap and water.
"Need a hand?"
She glanced over her shoulder. "He got lost."
"I know where I am," Walt said. "It's just not where I meant to be."
"Okay," Raymond smiled, confused.
Walt waved and turned down the tunnel, afflicted by the sudden need to jerk off. It was past midnight, but Otto was still on watch behind the newspaper dispensers he'd fortified at the base of the stairs. Rain punished the streets. Through the screen of mist, the mile-wide lights of the mothership hung to the west, implacable behind the black swirl of clouds. Walt went behind the counter of the CVS, where he had just enough light to complete his business, then went back into the tunnels to tell the others the ship had come back.
"About time," Otto said.
David ran his finger down the ridge of his ear. "What does this change?"
"I'm sure they'll be texting me that info any second," Walt said.
"I'm ready to go," Raymond said. "Just let us know what we need to do."
What they needed to do was watch. That was the whole strategy: minimize risk while grinding away. In that vein, they watched from the rooftops in the foggy night, rain thumping the tarps they carried for cover, and returned to the tunnels half an hour before dawn. Otto took the bathroom mirror from the CVS, carefully smashed it in half, and left the shards at the top entrance, standing the largest piece upright. He settled in down the stairs and watched the reflected street through his binoculars. Late in the afternoon, he woke Walt from a platform nap. The patrols were back.
"They can track cars really well," Raymond said. "We can drive one a few blocks, pull over and set up down the street, and see who comes out to play."
Otto smirked. "Good luck finding a battery that isn't deader than Ethel Merman."
"Who?"
"Could work," Walt said. "Any idea how big the blast radius is on their bombs?"
"Under a block." Anna sketched an intersection in the dust, circled a quarter of it. "I spent a while in San Francisco on my way down. Ran with these soldiers for a week or so. Crazy crew. When they weren't having orgies on top of Coit Tower, they were strolling over the hills with SAMs on their shoulders. Eventually, they all got killed, mostly in bombings that were hot and awful, but wouldn't frizzle your hair from a block away."
"Still a variable," Walt said. "A bad one."
"We haven't done this before," Raymond said. "They'll think we're from out of town."
He didn't like it. He didn't trust cars. Maybe that was just the New Yorker in him. "Find something we can drive."
Otto insisted on aiding Raymond's search, likely because he'd die of withdrawals if he didn't get behind the wheel and under the hood of something stat. He returned equally proud and ashamed of his find: an old-model Tempo, paint flaking from its roof, hood, and doors, one of which was crumpled by a generous dent.
Otto toweled oil from his knuckles. "Your power locks don't power, your automatic seatbelts would earn you a ticket in 48 states, and from the rattle I'm guessing your catalytic's been taken behind the barn and shot years ago. But it runs."
He'd jammed it in neutral so they could push it down to Santa Monica Boulevard without turning over the engine and risking an early visit from alien fliers. The rest of the team gathered up lasers and bows, taking pistols, swords, and hammers for emergencies. Once they were ready, Walt ran them through the plan a second time: David in the crow's-nest, spotting. Himself and Mia holed up a few blocks down, lasers ready. Otto and Anna another block further. Raymond, driving, would roll past, park three blocks past Anna and Otto, and run back to join them. If nothing came by to investigate within twenty minutes, they'd relocate their shooters down the street and try again.
In the street, the rain sifted down in tiny specks just like it had in New York, like dust in an afternoon sunbeam, the kind of more-than-drizzle that would take forever to soak your clothes but leaves your skin slick and cold in seconds. Despite that and the late December date, it wasn't truly freezing. Winter and midnight and the worst LA could offer was a chill. These people hadn't known how good they had it.
A scout ship keened from miles away, lost in the charcoal skies. They took turns pushing the car, two on the bumper with one at the wheel. The remainder watched the clouds and the street. The gutters were clogged and gray. The ankles of Walt's pants grew sodden, clinging to his legs.
They double-parked beside a blue Civic with a skeleton behind the windshield. David started up the stairwell to an office roof. Otto jogged off to scout the street. The dome light flipped on when Raymond opened
the door. He stopped halfway into the seat, teeth clenched, leg jutting from the car.
Mia started forward. "Let me help."
"I've got it." He didn't have it. He struggled and wiggled, hanging from the door frame, but when he tried to swing his leg into the car, he closed his eyes and went pale. "Give me a minute."
"Hell no." Walt leaned in to pull him from the car. "You can't be gimping it up if they send a jet on the way. Driver's got to get out of the blast radius the instant he shuts off the car."
"Or she," Mia said.
Raymond stumbled from the car. "No way."
"Like it's so much safer to hide in the rain waiting to shoot Cthulhu's bastard sons with a laser gun?"
Raymond glanced at Walt. Walt shrugged. "If there were kids here, I'd let the kids fight, too."
"I don't like it," Raymond said.
Mia reached for his elbows. "If we can't do this all the way, we shouldn't be here at all."
Raymond leaned in close to her and said something too soft to hear. When they broke, Mia slung herself behind the wheel and poked at the controls until the wipers swished rain from the windshield. She turned the key. The engine kicked over, idling with a metallic rattle. Exhaust wafted into the dank air. Mia turned off the car. Walt could no longer hear the keening of the scout. The dark, rain-slicked streets looked alien, a gray netherworld from a primal past or an exhausted future. He suddenly wanted to leave. The street, the city as well. His skin prickled.
Otto ambled back to the group, rifle pouched in the crook of his arm. "All clear."
Walt gazed down the street, waiting for a sign that wouldn't come. If he'd been on his own, he would have walked away.
"Walt?" David said over the walkie-talkie, infuriating him instantly—they were reserved for emergencies, who knew whether the aliens could pick up their signal. "I think something's coming."
Clouds flowed inland, black and thick. At first Walt thought his ears were making up the sound, giving themselves something to hear besides the spatter of rain from the eaves of empty bars and Thai joints and dress shops. Then a ship slashed below the clouds, furls of vapor trailing in its stream. Down street, it braked sharply and turned on its tail.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 26