Her dad clunked to the side of the boat to bring in the lines, then came back to lend her a hand. They finished up and Raina scraped the gunk from beneath her nails with a rust-spotted file. He pulled up the anchor and she trimmed the sails while he steered back toward the dock. She helped tie off, then hauled the coolers over the side. Her mother sat in the front yard watching, resting up before it was her turn to work the catch. She waved her tan, lean arm. Raina nodded, arms full, staggered toward her with the first cooler, then went back for the second.
Her mom went around back to start up the fire. At the base of the dock, Raina's dad handed her a damp towel to swab off the salt.
"I'm going to the ruins," she said.
He smiled. "The ruins."
"I'll be back by dusk."
"It's not the dark I'm worried about."
She bladed her hand against the stunning sun. "Dad. I'll be fine."
He grinned and waved inland. "Don't max out my credit card."
She switched her gutting knife for something that smelled less like fish, grabbed her pack, and headed up the hill. The afternoon had burned away the June Gloom fog and she sweated freely. Hummingbirds skipped between the thorny flowers lining the road. A crow scorned her from the roof of a skull-like mansion. At the top of the hill, she stopped and turned, both to take in the sunshine gleaming from the bay, and to make sure the alien ship hadn't moved.
Twenty miles away, it jutted at an angle from the waves off Venice Beach, a discus of impossible size, black-hulled and broken. Silent. But it was a false silence. It wasn't the silence of the dead in the ground. It wasn't the silence of the houses with their empty windows and cobwebbed halls. It wasn't the silence of the thousands of cars rusting out beneath the gentle breath of the Southern California sea.
People tried to go to that ship sometimes, their little sloops so small in the shadow of its busted shell. They went to take from it. Maybe some went to it for the same reason she went to the ruins, to claim ownership by their presence. Maybe some went just to tell their friends they had. Whatever their reasons for going, none of them came back.
Because its silence was the silence of the predator.
She muttered under her breath. A steady speck of white caught her eye between the mainland and Catalina Island far to the south. She watched the sail for a minute, then turned and went on her way. It was hotter past the hill, but she didn't slow down until she reached the wide black mall parking lot.
Most of the car windows were smashed in, their fuel doors popped open. Raina walked between the rows with the same feeling she used to get when her first parents took her to the church. The mall's windows were broken, too. The old people had been crazy to build so much from something as flimsy as glass. The few that weren't smashed were blank with the dust that appeared every time there was a mist. Raina stepped into a stripped-out department store, walked through picked-over racks of light jackets and sweaters meant for a spring that never came, and paused to let her eyes and ears adjust to the quiet gloom of indoors.
It smelled musty and dusty. A mouse rustled in the shoeboxes along the wall. Knife in hand, Raina wandered further into the dimness of the old store. She wasn't looking for anything special; her parents more or less had everything they needed to run their home, and this was far from the first time Raina had come here. She felt compelled to visit, though, picking up caked-solid canisters of makeup and setting them back down, flipping through racks of dresses so gauzy they'd tear to pieces during a single day of work.
Part of it was about remembering, about trying to reach back to the days before the sickness. Her parents—her new parents—answered her questions the best they could, but their words were sterile, distant. The only way to understand the old people was to walk with them: their houses, their churches, their stores. To stand where they'd lived and soak in their essence and learn how they'd failed.
But she wouldn't deny that it was also fun, in a very simple and deep-down way, to pick through their things and occasional take some of them home.
She walked past a rack of what her mom called sweatpants—she didn't know why you would wear clothes designed to make you sweat—and exited into the high-roofed space connecting the stores. She skipped the neighboring shoe store (the last useful pair had disappeared a year ago and there was nothing left but foolish straps and heels) and the pretzel store with its nasty little piles of rock-hard mold. Meager sunlight slid through the skylights, illuminating square pillars of tumbling dust motes. Religiously, she skirted the light and, on the off chance something there would look better than last time, headed for the sporting goods store at the other end of the mall.
On her way there, plastic rattled on tile inside the discount store. Raina dropped to a crouch. The thing rattled again. She slunk inside, walking on the balls of her feet, breathing evenly through her mouth. Shelves of pastel eggs and plastic green baskets reached into the gloom. At the back of the store, a candle flickered, all but concealed by the metal rows.
She got out her knife and edged forward. Metal scraped softly. Something tinkled to the ground. Raina approached from the left of the candlelight. A teen boy crouched in a wavering circle of light, back turned, contemplating small pieces of metal and black plastic arranged on a blanket. Raina advanced with slow, smooth steps until she could have reached out and stabbed him.
"What's that?" she said. "More magic?"
Martin shrieked and leaped forward, stumbling into the metal racks, but careful not to trample his goods. He glared at her, sucking a scrape on his finger. "It's not magic at all."
"Then what is it?"
"I'm going to wire these solar panels to the radio." He lifted a flat-topped black stake from the blanket. She'd seen others like it lining paths of front yards and flowerbeds gone to seed. "Maybe they'll provide enough of a charge to make it run."
"Yeah," she said. "Magic."
"No, it's not. Didn't you have TV when you were a little kid?"
"I don't have it now."
He gave her a look and sat down next to his project. "What are you doing here?"
"Hunting."
"What for?"
She put her knife away. "I don't know."
"You smell like fish," he said, then blushed, as if he were the one who stunk.
"So what?" She sat down across from him, candlelight wavering over her hands. "What are you going to do with a radio, anyway? Prop open a door? Does anyone else even use them?"
He pried open one of the stakes with a flathead screwdriver. "That's what I want to find out."
She nodded to herself. Martin and his mom lived down the shore; she had been a nurse or something, and when Raina's new parents had brought her in from the wild, Martin's mom volunteered to move in and help. Martin wanted to be Raina's friend from the very start. Even after she attacked him. Twice. There were virtually no children left their age, so it's not like he had much in the way of options, but she got the idea he would have wanted to be her friend even if he had a wider choice. She was different, and different was interesting. Sometimes she thought he wanted to be different himself.
"I'm sorry I said you smell," he said.
"But I do," she said.
"I didn't mean it like that."
"Well, you smell like grease."
Laughter bubbled from his throat. "Do you even know that's rude?"
"Oops." She reached for a green board studded with little pins. Martin looked pained, but didn't protest. She turned it over in her hand. "Want to go exploring or something?"
"I want to see if this works. If it does, maybe I can make us some walkie talkies." He glanced up from under his scruffy hair. "Wouldn't that be cool?"
"Walkie talkies?"
"Personal two-way radios. Anyway, I don't think it's a good idea to be outside right now."
"Why? Do you think you saw another tiger?"
"I did see a tiger." He scowled. "But no. Because of the men on the boat."
"What men on the boat?"
&
nbsp; "The ones who killed Mr. Horowitz." He quit fiddling with his screwdriver. "Didn't you hear?"
"No."
"They came from the island. A whole bunch of them. They asked for some of Mr. Horowitz's corn. When he said no, they killed him and took it. Then they gathered up all his neighbors and asked them for stuff, too."
The sailboat coming from Catalina. Her blood iced over. "When?"
"Two days ago?"
She stood and touched her knife and ran for the front of the store.
"Hey!" Martin called, voice echoing in the empty space. His footfalls chased her into the middle of the mall. "Raina! Where are you going?"
She skidded and turned. "That boat's coming to my house."
He ran through a square of sunshine, lighting up the fear on his face. "I'm going with you."
"Then keep up."
She sprinted through the department store to the front doors, pack bouncing on her back. The afternoon had cooled and a sea breeze shuffled the palms. The trees were so overgrown that a falling frond could knock her down or split her skull. She swerved from the sidewalk and ran down the middle of the empty street. Martin pounded along behind her. He was short and didn't look like much, but he spent a lot of time with his hands, including rougher work with wood and stone, and after several blocks, he'd only fallen back a few feet.
She took a shortcut through one of the burnouts, temporarily immune to the unease she felt whenever she wandered into one of the blackened neighborhoods. Grass and shrubs sprouted from the charred skeletons of houses. She thought she could still smell the scorched fat absorbed by the burnt wood. The young trees were shorter than she was and she ran in the open sunlight, sweat moistening her back. Before cresting the hill, she detoured two blocks over to a neighborhood mostly untouched by the years of fires where she would have more cover.
The street ran straight down from the hills to the shore a half mile away. A long white sailboat sat at their dock. Martin ran up beside her, breathing hard.
"What's going on?"
"I saw them on my way to the mall," Raina pulled off her pack and rooted around for her binoculars. "I didn't know who they were. I didn't know they were coming."
"Are your parents okay?"
She fit the binoculars to her nose. Even at their highest power, it was impossible to make out the details of the men swarming across the dock. A man stood alone in the yard. A couple dozen others approached through the patchy grass, spread into an enveloping semicircle. Two men rushed the solitary figure, metal flashing in their hands; he fell quickly.
Another person rushed from the house. Her mom. A woman's scream floated on the damp air, carried by the wind.
Raina rose and ran as fast as she could.
2
Walt took one last look at the pyramid that had been his base of operations, if not really his home, for the last—well, he wasn't quite sure how long. He believed he was close to turning thirty, which meant he'd spent the last two-plus years in the surrounding jungle and the nearby beach, but he'd quit keeping track of days a long time ago. What did a few weeks here or there matter? He'd start paying attention again once they announced the next World Series.
He'd figured he'd be fine as long as he knew what season it was, and any dummy could tell the difference between sweating and snowing. Then he promptly moved to a jungle not far off the equator, a place where the seasons consisted of "rainy" and "not quite so rainy." Things had gotten a little hazy. By the time he thought about resuming a strict count of the days, if only to make sure someone on the planet was still doing so, the whole idea felt daft: not only would it be inaccurate, but the end of civilization really felt like the sort of thing that should prompt you to start a new calendar.
In short, it was something like 5 After Plague, and besides getting lots of exercise, killing a bunch of animals, mostly for food, and masturbating—though much less than in his teens and early twenties, and to be fair, his daily average was below one, which he felt was pretty good, considering how much spare time he had on his hands—he hadn't been up to much worth keeping track of anyway.
Which went a long way toward explaining why he was following this woman on a three-thousand mile journey to help deal with her alien problem.
The ziggurat of Chichen Itza squatted inert under the searing jungle sun, its terraced limestone oblivious to the sapping heat and humidity beating down from the sky. In a way, it was inspirational. A lesson to us all: unless you're made of stone, stay the hell out of the jungle.
He hiked his pack up his shoulder. "I hope your car has air conditioning."
"What car?" Lorna said.
"The one you really should have brought with you."
"Will that be a problem?"
Walt shrugged. "Only if you've got something against jaguar attacks, grubs for dinner, and horrendous diarrhea."
She unfurled her long black hair, combed her fingers through the sweaty tangles, and expertly swept and pinned it back atop her head. "Our boat's on the south coast of Mexico. We made it from there on foot just fine."
He tugged up his collar and wiped his forehead. "Be right back."
He turned around, waved at the pyramid, and trudged back to its base. He opened the door to the staircase leading up its guts and got out his orange plastic bucket and a length of lightweight rope. He already had his machete and his pack. That about covered it.
"What's that?" she said when he got back.
"It's known as a bucket."
"What makes you think you'll need a bucket?"
"I don't know if you've noticed, but there aren't a lot of rivers around here. Water collects in these great big pits that aren't a lot of fun to fall into."
She tilted her head. "We have water."
"All I'm saying is it would suck if we didn't." He slung the rope over his shoulders and clipped the bucket to his pack. "Ready when you are."
She started across the knee-high grass. Back in the day, the clearing around the pyramid and the ball court and all the little temples surrounding the area had been kept clear by the Mexican government. The jungle had already begun to reclaim it, saplings and shrubs creeping in from the crush of the forest. Walt didn't expect to come back—not that he meant to stay in L.A., either—but if life's strange tide carried him back to the Yucatan at age forty, he doubted he'd be able to find the site again, its ancient stone swept under by the advancing glacier of green.
Five men waited inside the treeline. Four were white; he hadn't seen such light-skinned people in years. Lorna introduced Walt to her cousin Hannigan, a ruddy-faced dude with small brown eyes, and to Ken, a quiet and compact man with a very long and very black rifle. There were three others whose names Walt didn't catch because he'd stopped paying attention. He'd never been good with names, and Lorna seemed like a much better use of his attention.
"Okay," he said, clapping his hands. "Who's got the map?"
Hannigan eyed him. "Thought you knew your way around."
"That's why I want to see what route you're taking."
The man reached into his pocket and unfolded a road map of the Yucatan/Central America region. He traced his finger along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, then slanted down to Mexico's southern coast.
"Look good?"
"For the first couple days," Walt said. "Then we're going to have problems with the locals."
"Local who? Tribes?"
"Not like tribes tribes. They aren't running around with poison blow darts. They're people who went into the jungle when the virus hit and never came out."
The man leaned forward. His sweat smelled less than a day old, as if they'd freshened up to make a good first impression. "We made it here all right."
"Then you got lucky," Walt said.
He touched the pistol on his hip. "Or the locals knew better than to mess with us."
"The locals are a lot more scared of outsiders infecting them with the Panhandler virus than they are of a few guns. Which they have too, by the way. Mostly AKs."
"They don't know that." Walt batted at a fly on his neck. "Do we know that? Survivors are immune, but what if we're carriers?"
The man tilted his brow forward. "This isn't a discussion. We detour, we slow down. Spend more time exposed to whatever you're afraid is out here."
"Cool. Then when the locals show up, I'll head into the jungle and meet you at the boat. If you don't show up in two weeks, I'll say a prayer for your souls and go home."
Hannigan smiled with the left half of his mouth. "We'll see about that."
They started down the road. The jungle canopy shaded them from the battering sun, but the air was damp and hot, like they were trudging through a giant sauna. Or, given that there might not be any saunas left, what it was most like was a goddamn jungle.
Walt sipped warm water. Birds and monkeys yelped from the trees. Insects buzzed constantly, seeking each other in the jumble of green, flitting into the open road to bite the humans' exposed necks, hands, and faces. Hannigan walked with an assault rifle draped over his chest, gaze ticking between the monotonous lines of trees.
"How many aliens are we talking about?" Walt said.
"We don't know," Hannigan said.
"A hundred? A million?"
"More than the first, less than the second."
"Why don't you just bomb them? It's been a while since I tangled with them, but they really didn't care for being bombed."
"They're sheltering in the ship," Lorna said.
Walt swabbed his forehead. "So bomb the ship."
"We can't get to it by boat. We've tried a few airfields, but all the jets were destroyed in the war. Not that we even have a pilot. Or a nuke. Or the desire to nuke something thirty miles from our home. We have to get inside. We need you to get us there."
"Just seeing if you'd done your homework."
The road through the green went on and on. The walk was unpleasant—in the swarming, itchy heat, moving was unpleasant—but the road made for easy going, and with plenty of water in their canteens, they made good time. Four miles per hour, maybe better. He could see the argument against scaring up a car. Cars were loud. Conspicuous. Prone to breaking down at bad times. After years sitting idle, none would turn over without a lot of work. Dead batteries. Flat tires. Corroded wires. Finding gasoline was no sure thing, either, and it would probably have gone bad anyway. The roads could be clogged, or busted up by the jungle's searching roots. The trip appeared to be five, maybe six hundred miles; substantial, but not grueling. Doable.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 72