"You lying to me, Tristan?"
She squinted against the smoke. He hadn't shaved in a week and his long hair was held behind his head in a samurai knot. She rolled her eyes. "You'll have to forgive me. I left my birth certificate back with civilization."
"Got a boyfriend, Tristan?"
"I left him with my birth certificate. What do you know about the camps?"
He drew on the cigarette. "Do you suck?"
She took a moment to process that was what the man had really said. "Do you?"
"How bad do you want to know about the camps?"
"If you know something, we can deal. I have food."
"Me too. What I don't got is a girl. Or enough flexibility to pretend."
Tristan glanced at a crow pecking at something in the sun-splashed parking lot. "It's just information. It won't cost you anything."
"And all I want for it is five minutes of your time." He dropped his cigarette, stamped it out, keeping his eyes down. "No one has to know. Nobody's left to know. It only seems like a lot because we used to treat it like a lot."
"It's not on the table. The table has been burnt and left on the side of the highway."
He nodded, gazing at a planter where crickets chirped in the shadows of the weeds. "Same question as before: how badly do you want it?"
"Enough to be here."
"Same here. So why don't we satisfy our wants together?"
She met his eyes. He raised his brows and glanced back at the crickets. Tristan considered her gun. "Would you have talked this way before the plague?"
"What's it matter?"
"I want to know whether I should worry about turning into a pathetic little vulture, too."
He smiled angrily and reached for her face. "Listen, that's no way—"
Tristan moved with him, pivoting to the left, away from his reach, while thrusting her left palm forward and intercepting his forearm with hers. At the same time, she snapped her right fist into his nose.
Tristan would replay that moment for days, weeks, years. Enough times to know with bone-down clarity she could have ended it then and there. But she was too used to punching walls. Too conditioned by solo one-step sparring, where each strike and block was followed by a pause and a reset to her default stance.
She struck his face. He staggered back. She paused.
He swung for her cheek. She lifted her left to block with her wrist, but she caught him too near the elbow and his fist hinged into her face. She'd diverted half the force, but the remainder stung her, making her hesitate again. He drew his pistol from his hip and leveled his arm.
She grabbed his wrist with her left hand, straining to keep his aim offline, and slammed her right fist into the veiny softness of his inner forearm. The gun flew from his hand and spun over the pavement. His left hand, free and clear, hammered into her head. She dropped to one knee. He hit her again, knocking her down, and dropped his knees onto her chest, driving the air from her lungs. The rifle dug into her back. She groped for her pistol, but he spread his knees apart, pinning the weapon and her left hand to the sidewalk.
He swung his right fist and she slapped it past her ear. His left struck her eye, bouncing her head against the concrete. Stars burst across her sight. His next punch slammed into her mouth, tearing her lip over her teeth. She tasted copper. He hit her again and again. She felt two of her teeth uproot from her jaw, strings of gum-flesh yanking away. She prepared to die.
The man grabbed her throat, pushing his thumbs into her windpipe. The short respite brought Tristan back into the world. She clawed for his eyes, nails scraping furrows of skin from his cheeks. His hold relaxed; he cried out and jerked his head, biting for her fingers. Her right index finger slipped inside his wet cheek. He bit down until his teeth clacked together. White fire exploded from her hand. Her finger was a one-knuckled stump. He spat her severed finger into her face and bore down on her throat.
Her vision grayed. He leaned forward and she jerked her left arm free from his knee. She groped for her pistol, but he spread his knees further, covering the gun. His shorts rode up his hairy thighs. She snaked her hand inside one leg of his shorts and grabbed his testicles.
She twisted, pulled, and squeezed.
He yelled and leaned down, thumbs crushing her throat. She felt something give in her hand, a semihard, gelatinous orb breaking into pieces. His hands disappeared from her neck. He arched his back and screamed, pulling away. She yanked her hand toward herself, grinding her palm, nails slicing his skin. He fell to his side and clamped his hands to his bleeding crotch. She picked up the fallen pistol in her left hand, her right dripping blood. The man had enough survival instinct remaining to push himself up on his hip. She punched the pistol into his mouth, shattering his teeth.
"Suck."
His eyes went wide. She pulled the trigger. Pink goo fanned the sidewalk. His head yanked back. He slumped, head lolling, blood watering the ground. Tristan jerked her hand, slinging the gun away. She dropped to the ground. Blood dribbled from her face and squirted from her finger. Nausea cramped her guts. She retched, thin streamers of blood mingling with spools of saliva and bile. Pain thundered over her with every heartbeat. Her knucklebone peeked from her finger. The man's head was a hollowed gourd. She lay on the ground and sobbed.
She couldn't stay here. She was exposed. Badly hurt. She sat up. The blood left her head in a welcome rush; for a moment, the pain faded. Its return was as sharp as chipped glass. She used her pocketknife to cut away the hem of the man's shirt, holding the nub of her finger away from her grip, then awkwardly wound the cloth around the stump of her knuckle and clamped down until the pain defeated her. She spat blood from her mouth every few seconds. A red puddle grew beneath the man's head, seeping through the sidewalk's cracks, crawling past her fallen teeth.
Tristan hauled herself away, gun in hand. She gargled a mouthful of water, managed to get down a drink. She needed to get off the streets. Get home. She stood and waited for the blood to return to her head. Each step jarred the wounds on her face. She hugged herself, the pistol in her hand digging into her ribs.
She forced herself not to stop. Even when she vomited again. Even when the pain grew so bright the street shrank to a fuzzy gray circle. She was a half block past her house before she realized she'd gone too far. Inside, she bolted the door and lowered herself to the rug in the wood-planked foyer.
She stayed there until the flames of pain burnt down to aching embers. She found a half-full fifth of vodka in the pantry and used it to swab her finger and face. Her cheeks and eyesockets felt swollen, distended. Possibly broken. Would she be ugly? She sobbed again, not so much for her vanity as for being unable to stop herself from having the thought.
She knew she needed to find antibiotics, but she had no strength left in her limbs. She drank a bit of warm Sprite and lowered herself to bed.
She woke in the night, but lacked the strength to do more than drink the rest of her Sprite and a bottle of water and choke down two handfuls of kettle chips. Come morning, she ached just as bad, but she made herself scour the neighborhood door to door, checking medicine cabinets, refusing to let herself see the face in the mirror. Her hopes were low, but she found the right pills within an hour. And more than that. Painkillers. She took two of each and returned to the house.
She stayed indoors for days, stepping out only to go to the bathroom in a corner of the sun-browned yard. As her physical misery ebbed, doubts played in the spaces it left in her head. She should have just done it. It would only have taken five minutes. If she had just been able to get over herself for that long—to block it out, to think of England, to crush her hateful awareness beneath the understanding of the act's purpose—she could be on her way to find Alden right now.
She wallowed in this for three days, hating herself and her weakness. She tried to drown it with pills and the nightly AM broadcasts of a chatterbox named Josh Jones. But she kept coming back to the doubt, worrying at it like a dog chews its own cuts, heedless of
the damage.
A single thought silenced the others. The man hadn't been entitled to ask. She wasn't a device for his physical release; she'd done nothing wrong in wanting to find her brother. Anger coursed through her, hotter even than the pain when the man had bitten off her finger, an anger so loud and insistent and consuming she laughed and cried in wrath. She wanted to destroy him all over, to smash his teeth and hollow his head a second time. She lurched from bed, sheets falling from her shoulders, and took up her pistol and her rifle and walked down the streets in broad daylight, hoping someone would step out and try to stop her so she could shoot them dead.
The body was still there in front of the Walmart, but the face was gone, chewed away by dogs. The brains had been lapped from the sidewalk. Brown blood sheeted the ground. Tristan hadn't known exactly what she meant to do—shoot him, drag him around—but nature had done its own work.
It wasn't enough to quell her rage. That showed all signs of lasting. Even so, it couldn't extinct the doubts, which emerged in the small moments of the night to remind her of her low worth and massive guilt, to ask whether it might not be better to be dead. She had no escape from this. She feared she never would.
There was a single silver lining to her time in recovery in the dark and too-hot house. Josh Jones' nonstop mouth blabbered through the nights, passing on news and rumor from all corners. Aliens laying waste to Chengdu. Gang warfare leaving Milwaukee in flames. And a cryptic message about a resistance movement named the Bear Republic Rebels, a group Tristan worked out was based somewhere outside L.A.
She still hurt, and still hadn't met her own gaze in a mirror, but she was ready to move. Her best chance of finding Alden was to find the people dedicated to tracking and fighting the aliens.
She detoured south to Phoenix, meaning to bypass the prison camp in the desert. There, she swapped out her bicycle for a Vespa—the bike, for all its advantages, was limited by her own legpower, and if she got injured along the way, she couldn't afford to be stranded again in the desert. She strapped the scooter with a red plastic gas jug and a siphon tube and cut straight west for Los Angeles. Her radio killed three sets of batteries along the way. Listening to Jones each night, she gleaned the rebels were encamped somewhere north of the city.
That left an awful lot of ground. But they'd need water. Even with that to narrow it down, it took three weeks of riding through the mountains to find them at Pyramid Lake along I-5.
They weren't much. Men and women in camo tents. Jeeps and SUVs parked under beige tarps to shield them from sight of passing jets. Two men climbed the switchback trail to meet her, rifles raised. She had to make a fist to stop from going for her gun.
She killed the Vespa and stepped into the gravel, hands empty. "I need to see the man in charge."
"I bet a lot of people would," said a tattooed man in his twenties. His gaze skipped around her scarred face, focusing past her shoulder. His voice softened. "What do you want?"
"To kill aliens."
The older man chuckled. "Leave your weapons with me and I'll see if she'll see you."
"She?" Tristan said.
He raised his brows. "Last I checked."
"When did you check that?" the tattooed man said.
"Well, never, I suppose. Guess I've always just taken her word for it." He crunched through the gravel to Tristan. Heart beating, she handed over her guns and knives. The old man passed her weapons to his partner. "Mind if I search you?"
"Yes," Tristan said.
"Well, you got to understand we're not in the habit of marching potentially armed strangers straight to Dear Leader."
"I didn't say I wouldn't do it."
He scowled, creasing his beard. "Quit making my job tough, would you? You want me to do this, or want me to bring up one of the girls?"
She cocked her head. "You're fine."
He proceeded, businesslike, only pausing when he saw the scarring nub of her right-hand finger. After, he led her down to the lake, where the rebels caught fish and scrubbed clothes. Tristan accepted a bit of trout and a mealy bowl of boiled and mashed roots.
"She'll see you now," the older man told her a few minutes after sunset. He brought her to a cabin. Inside, a woman in her early thirties gazed down at a desk full of papers.
"Kerry tells me you want to join up," the woman said without looking up.
"Kerry's wrong."
The older man coughed. "Hey now, you said—"
"I said I wanted to kill aliens," Tristan said. "And I will. If they get in my way. What I want to do is find my brother."
The woman frowned, wrinkling her young face. "We're not a search and rescue team."
"And I'm not dumb enough to expect you to be. The alien prison camps. Do you know where they are?"
"We'd be pretty bad at this if we didn't."
"Any with children? Teens?"
"Could be," the woman said. "It's not a priority."
Tristan placed her four-fingered hand on the table. "They're taking kids and that's not a priority?"
"Tonight, I won't give it a second thought, and I'll sleep fine. Our one and only priority is the survival of the human race."
"Not to me."
"Sure enough." The woman tapped her fingers on the desk. "Not here to enlist? This meeting is through."
"I need to know where the camps are," Tristan said. "I need to find my brother."
"Then I'd advise you to get walking."
Tristan gazed across the desk. "It's just information."
"And it's also need-to-know." She stood, chair scraping. "Kerry will show you out."
Tristan stood perfectly still. Kerry wore a rifle on his shoulder; she'd need to take that away. Twist it to entangle his arm in the strap, the drive her elbow into his head. Take him down and turn the gun on the woman until she talked. Use her as a hostage to as Tristan retreated to her scooter. Would be an awful lot of guns trained on her when she walked out the door of the hut, but she didn't have a choice.
The woman smiled slowly. "You're thinking about killing me."
Tristan shook her head. "I'd need you alive. Talking. Convincing your soldiers not to shoot."
She laughed, shooting a bemused look at Kerry. She tapped her finger on the table. "You ever seen one of them in person? Do you have any idea what you're getting into?"
"They kept me captive for weeks. Last month, I escaped one of their camps. I was the only one to make it out."
"That were you got those scars?"
"The one on my neck." Absently, Tristan stuck her tongue into the gap where her left canine and nearest incisor had been knocked out. "The rest came afterwards."
The woman rolled her lips together, suddenly pensive. She rubbed her nose. "Farms east of Fresno. Somewhere off 168. That's where I hear they're keeping the kids."
"Thank you."
"Been a while since I heard that. Might not be any good."
"Then I'll keep looking."
The woman snorted. "No doubt. If you could kill a few of the squids while you're there, it would really give us a hand."
Kerry led Tristan outside. "She must have liked you. Sure I can't talk you into staying?"
"Where are my guns?" Tristan said.
He chortled. "Take it that's a no."
She'd grabbed a state map from a rest stop as soon as she'd crossed into California. She knew Fresno wasn't far, all things considered, but when she saw it was less than 150 miles north, she smiled for the first time in weeks.
She coasted down the mountain slope, buzzing past the yellow deadlands of Bakersfield. Smoke rose from the city. The grumble of machines. She needed gas, but she didn't stop to siphon any until she was on the very edge of town. Even then, she listened to the wind for engines or gunshots before she paused to take fuel.
She throttled the Vespa to its top speed, 40 MPH on flat ground. Twisted orchards flashed by, leafless and brown. Dusty signs denounced a senator for causing the drought. One denounced her for causing the Panhandler, too.
At the interchange, she peeled off I-5, Fresno-bound. An anxious readiness tingled in her veins. Field after field faded behind her, browned-out by the sun. Isolated patches of green exposed the people clinging to the land. She hit Fresno and followed the road through Clovis, heading for the hills. She thought she might face days of searching, but the blue cones stood from the heights like signal fires.
She parked by the road and crouched in the brush, sighting the alien camp through the rifle. Her heart sank with the sun. Besides the swaying grass, the grounds were motionless. She waited for nightfall before she climbed up the hills and entered the settlement.
She found no aliens. No vehicles. No people. If Alden had once been here, he'd been gone for a very long time.
23
Soldiers tromped across the dusty grounds. Ness stood still, fixated. The workers went quiet. A few trickled from the lodges to stand with the others. Curtains stirred in the windows.
Daniel walked behind the soldiers. Roan was with him, steps as smooth as a leopard's. A machine gun hung from her shoulder. Ness counted fifteen other troops, all armed.
Daniel clapped his hands and smiled. "I heard there's been a strike. That true, Howard?"
The old man—Howard; it was the first time Ness had heard his proper name—tugged on the bill of his faded baseball cap. "Looks like."
"Would someone like to tell me why?"
Faces turned to Ness. His went hot. He searched for words.
Erasmo stood. "Because you're working us to death and you're not even fighting back."
"Is that what you want to do?" Daniel said. "Fight back?"
"Hell yeah."
"All of you? You want to put your lives on the line assaulting superior beings who've already reduced humanity to far-flung tribes?"
"Better that than waiting for them to wipe us out," Ness said.
Several others murmured their assent. Roan found each speaker, her eyes lingering, as if fixing them in her mind.
Daniel ran his thumb through his beard. "I'd like to fight, too. Very much so. If it made sense, I'd devote every spare erg to the cause. But that's the thing. It doesn't make sense."
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 56