"You said you had tons of nuclear waste," Ness said. "How many dirty bombs would that be good for?"
"Hundreds," he shrugged. "Thousands. But after we set them off—assuming they have stationary bases worth bombing, and that we can reach those bases without being bombed ourselves—we will discover they just don't work."
"Radiation—the thing that kills everything—won't kill these things."
Daniel shook his head, morning light bouncing from his glasses. "Do you know how much cosmic radiation these beings must have absorbed over the course of their flight? Even if we assume they're capable of traveling at light-speed and that they came from the nearest extrasolar star, they spent five years in flight. It's more likely they spent ten. Twenty." He tipped back his chin and pursed his mouth tight. "A two-year flight would expose a human to enough cosmic radiation to cause a breakdown of the DNA. This, in turn, would case fatal cancer."
Ness glanced around for help. "So maybe they've got shields."
"Cosmic radiation differs from earthbound radiation in one key aspect: it's traveling very, very fast. As fast as matter goes. No amount of shielding could protect them from it."
"Well, they didn't take the fucking highway! Obviously they got through it somehow."
Daniel nodded soberly. "Indeed. Because they're immune."
"Immune to radiation?" Erasmo said.
"That's one option. The other—and, from a logical standpoint, perhaps more likely—is that they don't exist at all."
Ness gaped. Several people spoke at once. Howard's rangy voice cut through them all. "Better explain yourself, boss."
Daniel gestured at the sky. "Do you see any aliens? Have you ever seen any aliens?"
"I have!" Ness said.
"So you say."
"Because I'm in the general habit of saying true things. And am just concerned enough about my fellow man to want to warn him about the interstellar monsters that landed in my back yard."
Daniel tugged his nose and sniffed. "Where was that, again?"
"Moscow. Idaho."
"So the first and apparently only place the aliens stop when they finally reach Earth is a town so obscure you have to clarify which state it's in."
Ness' skin prickled. "You told me you knew about them. Do you actually believe what you're saying here? Or is this another lie to keep us happy and hoeing?"
Daniel blinked, affront spreading across his face. "I don't know whether there are aliens. All I know is what you say and what I've seen. I haven't seen any. Neither have the people we're in contact with in Spokane. Or Umatilla. Could there be aliens? Hypothetically. But the physical evidence suggests they'd have an awful hard time getting here. And if they were capable of such a thing, of absorbing or deflecting lethal doses of radiation, I don't see why they'd be incapable of continuing to do just that."
Ness could only shake his head. All that radiation stuff, was that even true? It sounded plausible enough, scientific enough, but—well, he supposed there was no but. It didn't matter whether it was true. It mattered how it sounded. Most of the audience around him had even less education than he did. Fieldhands like Nick. Old farmers like Howard. All they knew about space was it was really big and you couldn't reach it no matter how high you jumped. He could already see their doubt, their furtive glances.
Daniel made a pleading gesture with his palms. "We've been doing very well here. Power. Water. Plenty of food. Thanks to Ness, it's looking like we'll soon have cars again. Working farm equipment. I'm sure you'd all appreciate that."
The old scientist rubbed his temples, face a portrait of concern. "We're staring down a critical juncture. We're in the middle of harvest. If we finish reaping what we've sown, we'll find ourselves with abundance. Next year, we'll be able to divert that much more resources to the luxuries we're all missing. To making life better. We've all seen how fast things can change for the worse. Well, things can change for the better, too. But it's going to take a lot of hard work. If you've got questions, those I can answer. But if things stay where they are, all that food we've worked for will rot in the field. We'll lose a whole year. I may know how to maintain a nuclear reactor, but I can't turn back time."
The people did have a few questions—whether they would all have access to cars once the fuel came in, whether the settlement could divert the resources into getting the farm another pair of washing machines and dryers—but the answers didn't matter. He had already won them back. Roan found Ness' eyes and smiled.
They went back to the fields that afternoon. For lack of anything better to do, Ness went back to the stills.
"Did you really see the aliens?" Nick asked.
"They came right up to our cabin."
"Then why did Daniel say they didn't?"
"He's either ignorant or a liar." Ness pulled the lid from a fermenting tub. "I don't much like it either way."
The wagons returned with corn and wheat. The nights grew colder. The harvest finished days behind schedule. Kristin sent him a note asking him to cross the river, but when he went to see her, they would up fighting over the dumbest of things—whether Bush had been right to invade Iraq; Kristin thought the evidence had been fabricated, but Ness argued it didn't matter, not when Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator—and he went straight home, shivering in the north wind. The first frosts fell. The days alternated between cold and clear and cold and damp. He and Kristin made up, but fought again the next week. With Ness feeling the lowest he'd been since their mother had died, Shawn came to see him.
"What do you want?" Ness said. He was in bed reading one of the communal library's paperback mysteries. The cover had fallen off. He suspected his bed had fleas, too. He hadn't yet caught one, but he had small red bumps on his arms and legs.
"Just wanted to catch up with my baby brother."
Ness rolled his eyes. Shawn knew he hated that term. "Nothing to catch up on."
"Really? 'Cause I heard you were a little Che Guevara out here."
"Nope."
"Well, okay." Shawn plopped down on the end of the bed, jolting Ness' book from his hands. "Then I guess you don't care they just hired me to build a fence around you guys."
"What?"
"Now, a thinking man might ask, 'Why do they want an electrician to build them a fence?' But this here man just needs to think a little harder. What if the fence were electric?"
Ness set down his book. "Why would they do that?"
Shawn shrugged. He looked good. Tan. Well-fed. "Normally you rig one of those when you don't want your cattle getting loose."
"Do you know how Daniel broke our strike? He told them the aliens weren't real."
"Tell that to the shit I dropped when they came to the cabin."
"Well, thanks for coming by to rub it in. After I kill myself, I'm going to haunt you. You'll never jerk off in peace again."
"I didn't come here to rub your nose in it," Shawn said. "I came here to do something about it."
"Like what?" Ness said. "Capture an alien?"
"Well, I was just gonna go yell in the streets or something. But yeah. Let's go bag us an alien."
"You're serious."
"Why not?"
"Where are we going to get an alien?"
"Last time I saw one, it was banging down our front door. Ness, I think it's time to go home."
Ness laughed, surprising himself. "Do you think we can take one alive?"
"Why? You want to do some probing? Give them a taste of their own medicine?"
"I want to poison one with radiation until it dies."
Shawn's face puckered. "You're sick, dude."
"Is that a yes or a no?"
"I'll get the jeep. You get planning."
Ness rolled out of bed. "Can you give me a ride across the river? There's someone I need to see."
"Hot piece of tail?"
"Don't talk about her like that."
Shawn snorted. "I bet."
The sun had set a few minutes earlier. Shawn's headlights slashed across
the black water. He dropped Ness off in front of the three-story outbuilding and Ness jogged up the stairs and knocked on Kristin's door.
"What do you want?" Her eyes were bloodshot, tired. "Think up some brilliant new defense of strike-first fascism?"
"I'm leaving," Ness said.
Her lips parted. "Ness. It was just a silly fight."
"Not you. And not long. Just until I bring back an alien."
Kristin drew back her chin, eyes darting between his. "Are you trying to impress me? Flowers are more traditional."
"Daniel's going to build an electric fence around the farm," Ness said. "To pen us in. And the only way I can get the others to do anything about it is to prove the aliens exist—and that we can kill them."
"I think the electric fence might be enough to get them off their butts."
"He'll just tell them it's for their own safety. I have to prove he's been lying about everything."
She rubbed her fist against her forehead. "Wow. Holy shit. What if you don't come back?"
"Then tell my friend Nick," he said. "And consider running away before things get any weirder."
They kissed, long and sweet. Ness put his hand up her shirt. She laughed and closed the door behind them. Down below, Shawn honked the horn.
"I think I hate your brother," Kristin said.
"He gets that a lot. Love you."
He hadn't meant to say it. Judging by her expression, she hadn't expected to hear it. He blushed furiously and ran down the steps. As he jumped into the jeep, Kristin opened the window and waved.
"Kind of skinny," Shawn said.
"Shut up."
Shawn told the guards he was taking Ness home for the night, then turned onto the southbound road. Cold air gushed through the roofless cab.
"How'd you get the jeep?" Ness said.
"Obviously I stole it. Guns are in back."
Ness twisted in his seat. The weapons gleamed from the floorboards. "How are we going to take them alive?"
"You got two and a half hours to figure that one out, smart guy."
Ness sat back and spent the next ten minutes wishing he'd brought a thicker coat. They roared through town and circled around to the highway, blowing past the defunct wineries and desiccated blueberry fields. The stars blazed from the sky. When he leaned close to the windshield, Ness could see his breath; it could snow soon. Cliffs of black basalt flanked the road. Wastelands of cheatgrass and sage blew past the car. Pullman was completely silent. No lights, no smoke of chimneys. The bodies dangling from the poles were months old.
"Well?" Shawn said as they drove into Moscow. Moonlight glinted from the curved metal roof of the Kibbie Dome. "What's the big idea?"
"Shoot them until they're dead."
"I could have thought of that. I did think of that."
"Well, what are we going to do, stuff a chloroformed rag in their beaks and hope they have lungs?" Ness pushed his wind-mussed hair from his forehead. "Anyway, they don't need to be alive for us to bombard them with radiation."
"That's messed up, messing with dead bodies like that," Shawn said. "Good way to wind up with a bunch of Godzillas."
The town was dead silent. A crater yawned across the intersection to the WinCo. Shawn slowed to the shoulder and stopped the jeep.
He huffed into his hands, breath roiling. "This place looks all jacked up. What say we proceed on foot?"
"Beats getting blown up on jeep."
Shawn handed him his old shotgun and a machine gun with three spare magazines. "It's set to three-round bursts. Nothing fancy about it. Your basic point-and-shoot interface."
"Thanks for putting it in my language." Ness turned over the matte black machine gun. "Where'd you get this?"
"Again, stealing. Let's roll."
Shawn jogged past the crater. The streetward faces of the dorms were pitted and scorched. A skeleton lay facedown in the patchy grass, legs missing, shriveled skin and ligaments clinging to its elbows and ribs. They crossed town without hearing anything but the calls of nocturnal birds and the rustle of rodents. At the hills on the east end of town, the trailer showed few signs it had been abandoned for the better part of a year. Cobwebs on the siding, wind-blown dirt. A profusion of half-dead grass. The windows were fine, though. A bit of cleanup and they could live there again.
They climbed into the pines and crossed the mountain. As they approached their old cabin, Shawn crouched low, gun ready, and slowed to a silent creep. Shredded boxes and bags littered the grounds; something big had gotten into their abandoned food cellar. The cabin appeared untouched.
Shawn stopped when the pines gave out. The Rogers' farmhouse waited down the mountain, as dark as the fields around it. He watched it through his binoculars for a long time, then passed them off to Ness.
"What do you see?" Shawn murmured.
Ness panned across the vacant grounds. "Whole lot of nothing. No ships. No cars. No creatures."
"Me neither." Shawn exhaled through his nose. "We might have just gone on a wild lobster-chase, man."
Ness' hopes sank by the moment. Perhaps the things had finished their research here and moved back to quash the major cities. He and Shawn could try Seattle. Portland. But that could add days to their venture. Who knew what was happening on the farm in the meantime. Even if they drove all the way to the cities, there was no guarantee they'd find any of the creatures there, either. If he and Shawn simply drove away, what then? What about Nick? What about Kristin?
"Want to check it out?" Ness said.
Shawn shrugged. "We came all this way."
They slunk through the high grass. No sirens sounded. No lights strobed. Keeping one eye on the house, Ness circled to the tree in the back where he'd buried the canister. A bowl-like hole had been dug in the ground. Winds and rains had softened its edges, half-filled it with dirt.
"Shit," Ness said.
"Shit?"
"They got what they came for." He didn't know why the aliens wanted the old canister so bad, but that's what had brought them to Moscow, that much was clear. "They must have been gone for months by now."
"Shit," Shawn said.
A blue bolt burned past Ness' head. He screamed and fell into the grass.
24
Tristan walked up the hill to the city of cones. Footprints told stories in the soil. Narrow, deep divots announced where aliens had walked. Five-dotted treads told of human toes. She shucked off her shoe and placed her feet next to the human prints. Almost universally, her feet were larger.
She approached one of the cones. A door unzipped itself and disappeared into the wall, producing a moist noise that reminded her of the orange. Tristan jerked up her pistol. Inside, the cone was nearly pitch-black, weak moonlight shining through the slitted windows. A ramp spiraled up the inside walls. She crawled up it, feeling her way forward with her four-fingered hand while keeping her gun ready in her left. At intervals, the ramp expanded into alcoves hollowed from the walls and flat platforms extending into the center of the cone. After reaching the top, she clicked on her penlight. The spaces were just as empty as they felt. Like the orange, the blue surfaces of the cone had a semi-organic feel, but were dry and pebbly beneath her fingers.
She poked around a bit, then walked back down the road to a one-story rambler with a functioning well and pump. At daylight, she returned to the city of cones for a longer look, but found nothing more than old footprints and empty buildings.
The trail went cold.
She returned to the Bear Republic Rebels to let them know the site had closed and to ask them to keep their eyes open. The woman asked her to join them. Tristan shook her head and walked back to the Vespa.
Los Angeles was half burnt; alien ships keened across the skies. She rode south to Anaheim, which had fared little better, and then to San Diego, where she parted with half a box of ammunition in exchange for the location of two more camps up in Oregon: one in Eugene, one in Corvallis. She motored north up I-5. Once, two wedge-shaped jets creased the sky, contra
ils spiraling behind them. A foreign tank had been blown across four lanes of the highway through Sacramento, its hemisphere cracked, burnt shards gleaming in the autumn sun. After the long yellow valley, she detoured around Redding and climbed into the mountains, where pines and redwoods thrust from the slopes to surround the serpentine road. Past the grasslands of south Oregon, she found the two camps. They were as empty as the one outside Fresno.
The days drew short and cold. Hope became a distant thing. She went back to the rebels and found they had gone. Perhaps they'd been wiped out.
She siphoned gas, collected food, rigged a second basket to the Vespa to tote her water. Learned what she needed and what she didn't. Her scars healed. On the off chance Alden had gotten free and returned home, she braved a trip to Redding, stashing the well-worn scooter south of town and approaching on foot through the woods. Smoke and engine-noise rose from the railroad tracks. Red skulls blazed from the walls of houses, grinning under the full moon.
The house, too, was empty. She stood in her old room and gazed at her old things. She went to the bathroom to pick up the extra toothpaste they'd left behind. Something flashed in the darkness. She drew her pistol; so did her reflection. From the safety of the shadows, she faced herself. Halfway down its slope, her nose crooked. A web of white scars snared her right eye. When she grinned, blackness gapped her leftward teeth. She smiled gently, eyes stinging. It was better than she had expected. Even so, it wasn't her.
September became October. The nights grew sharp. She scavenged a heavy leather jacket and a proper helmet. She avoided the cities as best she could, speaking to the survivors flung across the farms and small towns. After a while, and two shouting matches that had nearly become shooting matches, she developed a system: sit down a couple hundred yards in front of any obvious habitation—smoke and gardens were the most obvious giveaways; clean cars, too—raise a sign saying "TALK?", and wait for the survivor to emerge. Most times, the curtains ruffled once and not again, and Tristan rode away. Often enough, however, the survivor walked into the daylight, one hand raised, and Tristan stood and met them.
They were so eager to talk. So eager to hear. About the survivors. The aliens. The roads. The dangers and safe harbors she'd seen along the way. After soaking up five minutes of her stories, they were ready to tell her whatever she wanted about alien camps, other towns, whether they'd seen any thirteen-year-old blond boys. She drove through the damp chill of Portland and Seattle, then followed I-5 through the pine-choked hills to Bellingham. Miles outside Vancouver, she stopped the bike. The black ship hung above the city, impossibly large, a false moon above the field of pines.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 57