The Breakers Series: Books 1-3

by Edward W. Robertson

  What he couldn't understand is why they didn't bother to try to find bicycles. Those didn't guzzle any fuel. You could walk them around fallen trees or crashed cars. Minimal risk of a breakdown. Silent. Back when he and that couple—Mia, the pretty girl, and do-gooder whats-his-name—Raymond, that was it—when the three of them were trying to get away from the invaders in L.A., they'd used bikes, and it had worked like a charm. Couldn't very well drag them into the jungle, but they could always find new ones when they reemerged from the woods.

  Then again, he didn't care. He was just happy to be doing something again.

  At sunset, they went inside an abandoned gas station, swept up broken glass and leaves from the aisle in front of the rotted-out freezers, and unrolled their sleeping bags. Ken went for a walk around the grounds. Hannigan lit some candles and laid out their dinner, twists of dried meat and handfuls of dried blueberries. Walt ate some of the wild bananas and bell peppers and cassava and nuts he'd brought with him from the pyramid. After, Hannigan cleaned his teeth with a metal toothpick.

  "What kind of military background you got, anyway?"

  "Who, me?" Walt said.

  "I ain't talking to the monkeys."

  "None."

  "None like none? No Marines? No Army? No weekend National Guard?"

  "I always thought the military was for fucking jerks."

  Hannigan's smile tightened. He folded his arms, exposing a tattoo on his left biceps of an eagle crouched over the globe accompanied by the initials USMC. "And you took down the mothership."

  "I had help," Walt said.

  "What, the USS Nimitz?"

  "A Vietnam vet named Otto. We landed a hot air balloon on the top, cracked the engines with C4, infiltrated the bridge with lasers, and shot everything that—"

  "Bullshit," Hannigan said. Three others laughed. Ken and Lorna just watched. In the candlelight, Hannigan grinned in disbelief. "Can you believe it? We came for a warrior, but could only find ourselves a liar."

  Walt ate a nut he didn't have a name for. Not a proper one, anyway. He thought of them as "those little round guys that are disappointingly bland considering how hard it is to crack their shells," but he was sure the locals had a snappier term.

  "If you don't believe it, why did you come down here?" he said.

  "Somebody took down that ship," Hannigan said. "If we found him, we could wipe out the threat once and for all. Instead, we picked up a boasting little runt."

  "Dave," Lorna said sharply. "You heard the villagers. It's him."

  The man prodded his teeth with the steel pick. "That's what he told them, anyway."

  Walt laughed and stood, brushing his lap free of the dry, flaky bits of nutshells. "Well, good luck to you."

  "Where do you think you're going?"

  "Back to my friends the trees. They don't judge me."

  "Please sit down," Lorna said.

  Walt scratched his beard. He hadn't shaved in weeks, but if they had a proper trip ahead of them, he was going to have to do something about that. "Then make up your minds."

  "We have," she said. "We need your help."

  He nodded and turned to Hannigan, who removed the toothpick from his mouth and gazed at its tip.

  "Well, you're already here," the man said. "May as well come back with us."

  "Great," Walt said. "I'm going to sleep."

  He did. He was woken a couple times by those horrid night birds, then got up for good a little before dawn, going outside to pee and have a look around. When he got back, Hannigan was sitting up in bed, a pistol in his lap, watching the jungle.

  The others got up soon after. They got on their way and followed the road through the trees. Minutes after sunrise, the air was sweltering. A couple of the men grumbled and joked. They made good time again, stopping for the night in a shabby motel with a serious rat problem. In the middle of the third day, Walt stepped onto the shoulder of the road, unscrewed his canteen, and had a drink.

  "Can't use the road for a while," Walt said.

  "Says who?" Hannigan said.

  Walt pointed to the words carved into a trunk beside the road. "Says that."

  "Looks like gibberish."

  "It's Mayan. Roughly translated, it says 'Stay the fuck out.'"

  "You think they'll prefer us tramping through their jungle?"

  "So long as we go that way," Walt pointed south, "and stay out of everything up there," he finished, pointing first to the road, then the trees beyond.

  Hannigan spat. "It'll slow us down. A lot."

  "True. But you know what will slow us down even more?"

  "What's that?"

  He pointed to a leathery tarp suspended from the upper branches of the tree. "Getting shot and skinned."

  The man rubbed his stubble. "Lead on."

  Walt unsheathed his machete and stepped off the gravel. The jungle was a bitch. Three bitches and a half. Especially all the way out here, which he'd only visited a few times, and knew in only the most scant way, like when he'd left lower Manhattan to go see a Mets game in Flushing—it was still the city, yeah, but not his city.

  Even so, vines were vines. Trees were trees. Six-inch centipedes with venomous bites were six-inch centipedes with venomous bites. He stuck to the trails as best he could, consulting the compass in the handle of his knife every few minutes, but even when the way was relatively clear, it was a hard, muddy, grubby slog, as exhausting as it was frustrating. After just three hours, he sat to rest.

  Beside the trail, a small, leafy plant sprung from the moss in the roots of a tree. Walt pulled two sprigs, plucked the leaves, and preserved the flattish stems. He passed one to Hannigan.

  The man stuck it in his mouth and chewed the end like a piece of hay. "Tastes like poison."

  "Oh no." Walt paused with a fluted stem halfway to his mouth. "Oh no."

  Hannigan spat out a mouthful of green pulp. "Is it poison? What the fuck?"

  "No, it's just funny," Walt said. He stuffed his stem into his mouth and chewed the bitter, fibrous plant, then held up another for Hannigan. "Eat up. You'll feel better in a minute."

  The man fixed the plant with his round little eyes. "What's it called?"

  "Hell if I know. But it will make your muscles a lot less tired."

  Hannigan chewed suspiciously, gazing into the forest. Birds whooped from all sides. "We're good on food for a while yet. Water's another story."

  "Still, keep your eye out for bananas, cassava shrubs, obvious stuff. Or these little fleshy red flowers. We'll try to find a cenote tomorrow. A sinkhole."

  The man nodded distantly. Walt picked the rest of the plant, handed a stem to each of the others, and pocketed the rest. At least it was shady beneath the canopy. His shoes grew damp with sweat and water. Would have to build a fire within the next couple days, get dried out. He did not want foot problems.

  Parrots screeched. Smaller birds peeped. Bugs chirred. He didn't see any fruit, but late afternoon he found a patch of bamboo-like caña agria, which he deleafed, peeled, and passed around. The pulp tasted refreshing and sweet. Not very filling, but it was enough to wash the taste of travel out of his mouth.

  "Well," he said. "Suppose we should call it a day."

  "Can't stop already," Hannigan said. "It's an hour till the light's gone."

  "More," Walt said. "And I'd like to use that light to build a shelter."

  "From what? Jaguar? We got guns."

  He shook his head. "Ants."

  "Ants?"

  "Ants, man. They're the worst. I don't know why we're waging war on some dumb aliens when the whole goddamn planet is overrun by ants."

  Hannigan set his hands on his hips. "Unless that pack of yours is full of Raid, I don't see what we're supposed to do about it."

  Walt lifted his shirt and fanned his belly. Not that it helped. "Hammocks. I'm guessing you left yours at home."

  "We got a couple tents. Some netting. We aren't gonna get eaten alive, are we?"

  "No. Probably not. Look, a few night
s on the ground won't kill you. Unless the wrong kind of snake crawls up your pants. You guys live in Los Angeles, right?"

  Hannigan tipped back his head. "What's left of it."

  "And that place was fucked up even before the plague. But this is the jungle. The whole thing blows. And it blows even worse when ants are chewing you up in your sleep, and all you've had to eat is grass, and your feet haven't been dry for three days. Little things matter."

  "I got it, man. Let's string up some hammocks."

  Walt picked out a few small, bendable trees, roping them together and suspending his hammock. Hannigan had enough netting for a couple more; they fashioned a fourth out of one of the tents. That left three men on the ground. Walt thought about offering one of them his hammock, then concluded they could go fuck themselves.

  He woke sore. Hadn't done much trailblazing lately. Ken took up the machete in the early morning and was spelled within an hour. Despite the protests of Hannigan and another man whose goatee was getting rather overgrown, Lorna took her turn, too, whacking at the brush with loose-armed professionalism. Walt ranged to either side of their southwesterly trail, letting the jungle's pathways take him where they would. In places the canopy choked out the sun so completely that nothing more than grass grew in the shadows, allowing them to walk at something near a normal rate.

  With the sun hours past apex, Walt found a cenote. He whistled the others over to the circular hole straight down the limestone into a pool of creamy blue water. It wasn't an especially large one, forty feet across, but that was good, it meant he had plenty of rope. He lowered the bucket over the rim, let it fill halfway, and hauled it back up to the surface, the tough plastic banging thinly against the stone, water dripping back to the pool below.

  "Probably want to boil this," he said. "The Ancient Maya used to throw people into these things."

  Lorna frowned. "Surely they haven't reverted so quickly."

  "Probably not. But animals could have fallen in. Anyway, I'm not a fan of taking hour-long shits even if I've got a Stephen King book handy, so I say we boil it. Can dry our socks, too."

  It hadn't rained in the last few days. He sent the others to scoop up the driest grass and fallen branches they could find while he peeled bark from the trees and shredded it into a wooly mass. He set the kindling beside the trunk of a tall, broad-leafed tree. He still had 23 Bic lighters. He used his lucky pink one to light the fire. Ken strung up a line for their socks. Walt set his pan on a rack over the fire and filled it with water, then sat on a rock, barefoot, shoes steaming.

  "This," Ken said from the stump beside him. "This isn't so bad."

  "I don't think I'll miss it," Walt said.

  "You didn't grow up down here, did you?"

  "New York. By way of Long Island."

  "Crazy," Ken said. "And you wind up here and you make it."

  Walt shrugged. "People have made it here for thousands of years."

  One of the troops came back with two freshly killed iguanas, which they spitted and roasted. Hannigan had salt. Walt salivated at the sight of it. It had nearly disappeared from the ruins, looted long ago by other survivors. He'd tried evaporating seawater to make his own, but it was a tedious process, taking days to create enough to season a single meal of meat or roots.

  It was the best day and the best meal they'd have for some time.

  They walked on through the implacable jungle, feet aching, blisters popping, socks drenched. Their food dwindled. Walt sighed, considered the others, then smashed open what appeared to be a giant heap of dung. The termite grubs inside were better than nothing. They caught a bird with a broken wing and shared a quart of berries Walt was fairly sure weren't poisonous. He angled further and further west, certain he'd find the road soon, but either they were traveling slower than he thought or the map was wrong.

  People got touchy. Hannigan especially. Walt handed out orders in gruff clips. He wasn't any happier than they were. He refused to admit they were lost. Not in a meaningful way. The road was to the west. Even if the jungle had already consumed the asphalt, the ocean would only be a few miles beyond it. They'd be able to fish at least. Find their way to a highway and follow it up to the boat.

  For the first time on the trip, Walt went to bed with an empty stomach. Starlight sifted through the canopy. If he'd been on his own, he could keep himself fed easily enough. The problem was all these other mouths. Killing resurgent aliens no longer sounded all that fun. He ought to abandon these guys to the wilds and head back to his pyramid-throne. He resolved to give it two more days.

  At noon, they stopped to eat their remaining berries and a few of the knuckle-sized flowers Walt knew were safe. They were reddish and sweet, but didn't do much to fill the stomach.

  Hannigan plunked down beside him on a log. "Let me ask you something."

  "Shoot."

  "You know where in Christ we are?"

  He gestured to the trees. "The jungle."

  "How close to the road?"

  "Close."

  The man's ruddy face broke into a rueful grin. "Specifics, man. My belly's grumbling. I got the runs. My feet are no good. Right now, 'close' doesn't cut it."

  Walt poked a stick at an ant, crushing it into the dirt. "In case you haven't noticed, this place is fucking huge. I've only been down here a couple years. We left my back yard a long time ago."

  "Your brilliant plan was to cut brush through a jungle you've never set foot in?"

  "I know enough to get by on my own. I've never led an expedition."

  "Great. Fucking great." Hannigan stood, pacing through the weeds. "You're the one who took us offroad. I think it's time you stepped up."

  He stretched out his legs. "What exactly would you like me to do?"

  "Prove you're worth it! Prove to me there's a reason we sailed all the way down here and crossed six hundred miles of miserable shit just to pick up one more piece of it."

  "Why?"

  "Why? Because we thought we needed you." Hannigan laughed. His smile broke; he flung his canteen at a trunk. It connected with a hollow clunk. "So you killed a few aliens. That was years ago. What can you do for us now? Why don't you give me one good reason why I shouldn't punch your smirking mouth?"

  "Well," Walt said, gazing into the trees. "I've got one reason after all."

  "Come on. Love to hear it."

  "For one thing, I know better than to go hollering on in hostile land," he said. "For another, if I try really, really hard, I may be able to talk them into not killing us."

  He pointed across the jungle. In the shadow of the trees, four men stood in perfect stillness, so short you could almost mistake them for children. Their unblinking eyes looked down the barrels of AK-47s.

  3

  The falling sun splintered on the waves. She thundered down the hill, running so fast she knew she'd trip, skin her elbows and face across the asphalt. She kept her balance. Between the docks and the house, men shouted, waved guns. Martin called after her. She didn't slow.

  Her dad struggled to his feet, staggering away from the attackers, hands raised. He gestured behind him. Her mom disappeared into the house. The men who had struck him edged forward. One held out a pistol, the other cocked a club.

  Raina screamed.

  They all turned. Her dad, the men closing on him, the others watching from the dock and the deck of the boat tied to the cleats. She gripped her knife, running for the man with the pistol, zigzagging in, because you can't allow them a straight shot. The man hopped back a step and leveled his gun. Her dad shouted and ran forward, shielding his head with one hand. The man with the gun planted his feet. Raina showed her teeth. Her dad bowled into her ribs, scooping her up, pinning her knife to her side.

  The man with the gun glanced toward the sailboat. Raina wriggled against her dad's grip, but his hands and arms were hardened by daily fights with wind and ropes and sails.

  The man with the club squinted at Raina, then nodded. "She'll do."

  "You won't touch her," her da
d stated.

  "Are you under the illusion we're bargaining?"

  Her dad groaned, a sickly sound she could feel in her ribs. He crushed Raina's head to his chest, blocking her view. She felt him jerk his head toward the house.

  "Why not both?" said the man with the club.

  "We don't have all day," said the other man. "Choose."

  "Shit. That fruit ain't ripe yet."

  Feet slooshed through the grass toward the house. Raina squirmed. Her dad crushed her harder yet, turning his body so she faced the docks. The screen door squeaked and slammed. Her mom screamed but was cut off while the note was still rising.

  "Dad!" Raina choked.

  He squeezed her so tight she could barely breathe. The men in the yard shouldered their rifles, sheathed their knives. Some elbowed each other. Some stared at the sky. Her father's arms quivered. His chest shook. She fought to free her arms but he clamped down. She wriggled her face into his neck and bit his skin. He yelped, drew back, then nudged his head into hers.

  "What are you trying to do, Raina?" he whispered. "Fight?"

  "We have to stop them!"

  "And then what? Do you want them to shoot us? Do you want to die and leave your mother alone?" He hugged her to him. "This is the only way we stay together."

  She bit his neck harder, tasting blood. He didn't move. She screamed and squeezed her eyes shut, mashing her face into the sweat and blood trickling from his skin. His shoulders shook. He relaxed his hold and she fell away and shuddered. Gulls cawed on the breeze. The breakers curled in one after another, hissing into the sand.

  A man rose from the deck of the sailboat and leapt to the dock with a rattle of wood. He was tall, burly, bearded, and bald. He spat into the sea and strolled onto dry land.