"An necks?"
"They took us over. We're part of their land."
"No we're not," she laughed.
Martin's face went as sober as an angel's. "Raina, you can't let them hear you say that. They own us now."
"They only own the people who let them."
She wasn't about to hear more of his nonsense. She left the mall and headed west. A church stood on the next hill, a pretty thing the Spanish must have built hundreds of years ago. Most churches gave her the creeps—if she knew anything, it was that God didn't much like humans anymore—but the steeple of this church was a spike, and if God reached down to get her, He would impale His hand and leave to swat someone else instead. She jogged up the steps to the big wood front doors, then climbed the twisty staircase to the top of the tower, where she could see the whole city at once.
She had thought her new parents were strong for surviving the plague, but they were as weak as everyone else. When the water went dry, you found a new stream. When the food ran out, you walked away. That's what her year in the ruins had taught her.
But in that year, they had been the only ones who'd tried to help instead of hurt her.
She frowned at a loud crow. She didn't have to make a decision yet. That was one more thing the ruins had taught her. You don't move just because you're scared. Movement for the sake of movement exposes you to things you didn't know were there. No. You move when you know what to do.
She walked home. She let the screen slam behind her. In the shadows of the kitchen, her parents detached. Her dad was home. Her mother grinned and adjusted her shirt.
"Hi Raina," she said. "Find anything nice?"
"Yes," Raina said, "but then it broke."
While she thought about whether to run out on her parents, she filled her days with fishing, searching for tea seeds, and talking with Martin about the men from Catalina. The boat came again and she watched from the window while her dad handed over their things. She didn't like this. A stray dog will be wary at first, but if you don't chase him off, he'll get bolder. Especially when he has friends.
She was on her way back from the church a few days later when she passed a man on the road. He smiled and tipped his hat; the bill was streaked with dried white sweat. His sneakers were pasted with duct tape. A bedroll and a bulging bag projected from his back. He winked at her, comfortable on the road with the locals.
Her mom sat under the umbrella in the front yard. "Your father and I are going on a trip this afternoon."
"Where are you going?"
"We'll be gone two or three days. We've already spoken to Wendell. If you need anything, go see him."
Raina got a cup and the jug of clean water on the counter. "You're just telling me now?"
"Well, we only just decided," her mom said. "We're going to see a friend. Will you be okay?"
"I'll be fine."
Her dad emerged from their room and grinned. "Tell her?"
Her mother winked at her. "Yep."
"Then I suppose we'd better pack."
Raina went out back to scrape salt from the tarps and bring the evaporated and recondensed water inside. Her parents didn't take long to pack. They all had emergency bags waiting for them in the front closet. Besides that, all they needed to put together was more bedding, a few clothes, and whatever luxuries they thought they'd like along the way.
Her father hugged her tight. "You'll be fine."
"You've never left me alone before," Raina said.
"All things considered, I think you're plenty old enough." He laughed. "Don't you?"
"You don't have to work," her mom said. "Just stay safe. Go see Wendell if you run into any trouble."
She watched them climb up the hill. As they reached the top, panic shuddered through her, but it was replaced at once by a calm coldness. They would be back. And if they weren't, it wouldn't matter.
She hadn't had any for a while, so before it got dark, she went to the docks to cut mussels from the piling. She shucked them from their shells and boiled them with lemongrass from the garden and pepper from the cabinet. She had a bite of chocolate for dessert, then poured a small amount of vodka into her thermos, cut it with water, and sipped it as she prowled the shore toward the home of the man with two wives. The moon was fat and full again. Too drunk and logy to do anything but watch what was beneath it. The man and his two wives sometimes swam naked in the waves and the moon that night was perfect.
There were no blankets or bottles on the tideline. The house was dark. She crept through the tall grass, listened, and then, emboldened by the warmth in her veins, knocked on the door. No one answered.
That was weird enough that she tried knocking again in the morning to check on them, but they were still gone. She went up the hill to the house full of young people and asked for Chris, the woman who came to her parents' house on occasion to borrow a tool or a spice, but the blond woman who answered the door said she was out. Raina headed west across the dead lawns overlooking the ocean from their heights. Wendell stooped over his yard, hacking at weeds with a short-handled hoe.
He blinked at her, mouth half-open, then recognized her and smiled. "Fall into trouble already?"
"I got bored," Raina said.
The old man spread his hands at the hills and the sea. "With all this to explore?"
"I got bored of not finding what I'm looking for."
"What's that? A comb?"
She gave him a look. "Tea seeds."
"Why do you want tea seeds?"
"To make tea trees."
"I think they grow on bushes." Wendell wiped his hands on his overalls. "And I don't think they grew a whole lot of tea in Southern California. If they did, you might find some at the nurseries."
She considered the rich brown soil. "I saw a stranger on the road the other day. He had a hat and tape on his shoes. I didn't like how he looked."
"Everyone looks funny after they've been on the road long enough," Wendell said. "Though he had some funny questions, too."
"Like what?"
"Like what I thought of Catalina."
The little farm was just high enough up the hill to make out the black edge of the crashed ship. Raina watched it a moment. "What did you tell him?"
Wendell chuckled. "That I think whatever they tell me to think. He smiled and thanked me and went on his way."
She talked with the old man a while longer, but her mind had already moved on. Her parents' energy. The suddenness of their departure and how it had come right on the heels of the stranger's visit. The stranger's single question for Wendell. It was all connected, and Raina had a pretty good idea what it meant.
Her parents were rebels. Her parents were rebels, and she wanted to join them.
4
The men from the jungle waited in poised silence. They were short and deeply tanned and wore jeans and t-shirts for Joust and Pac-Man and celebrating the San Francisco Giants' 1989 World Series victory, which Walt was 90% certain had never taken place.
"Only four of them," Hannigan said. "We've faced worse."
"Four of them they want you to see." Walt set his hands on his knees. "The rest are behind us."
Hannigan craned around. One of his men took a step forward, speaking in Spanish. Machine guns tracked him.
"Tell your dudes to stay still," Walt said. "These people observe the Twenty Paces Rule."
"Twenty Paces Rule?" Hannigan said.
"Come within twenty paces, and they shoot."
"Seems harsh."
"It's how they kept the disease away." Walt rose slowly, hands up, and called across the tree-shadowed grass. "Hola. Somos amigos. Hooray!"
One of the men lowered his AK by an inch. He spoke in Mayan at a clip Walt could barely comprehend. "Who are you and what are you doing here?"
Walt replied in halting, poorly-accented Mayan. "Walt, and leaving."
"Why are you here?"
Hannigan leaned closer. "What's he saying?"
"He's saying the Irishman should
shut up." Walt turned back toward the gunmen. "We go through."
The other man stalked forward, returning his gun to his shoulder. "Go through us?"
"Passing through!" Walt tried in Spanish, then moved back to the Mayan he'd picked up from the people around the pyramid. "We go." He gestured at Hannigan's crew. "We go away. Please."
"You bring sickness."
"No," he said. There was one word he knew well: "Survivors."
The man with the gun said a word he didn't understand. Walt shook his head dumbly. The man tried again, then hissed through his teeth and said, "You can't be here."
Leaves stirred in the shrubs behind Walt. Hannigan grabbed his arm. "What's going on?"
"We're about to be turned into fertilizer."
"We have salt. Coffee beans. It's as good as money ever was."
"Great," Walt said. "While I attempt to buy passage, you figure out how to convince them not to just kill us and take it."
He knew the Mayan word for salt, but not coffee beans, especially the green, unroasted, pea-like beans Hannigan scrabbled from his pack, an action that drew shouts from the gunmen. Walt spoke in a mix of Mayan, Spanish, and English, first calming them, then indicating he would like to offer their goods as a toll.
"Put the something on the something," said the man with the machine gun, using several words that meant nothing to Walt.
"The what on the what?"
"The gifts," the man tried. "Put the gifts on the something. On the tree."
"The log?" Walt said in English, pointing to a downed trunk covered with moss and fungus and ants.
"Yes."
"Okay, we're doing an Arab barter thing here," Walt told Hannigan. "Set the salt and the coffee on that log, then back off and let them inspect it."
"And then?" Hannigan said.
"Make your peace with Jesus, because they're going to shoot us anyway."
Hannigan glanced between his men, then at Lorna. "Things might be about to get shooty. If they do, Ken hits their leader, the rest of us drop in a scatter-and-fold."
"Not likely," Ken said.
"You got a better plan? It'll work if you let it." Carefully, maintaining eye contact with the Maya, Hannigan set both bags on the log and backed away through the thick brush. The others followed. The men with the gun stalked forward.
"It's the lack of gratitude that really gets me," Walt said. "I killed the aliens. They should be giving coffee to me." He muttered the Mayan word for the creatures, then mimed an explosion. Leaves crackled beneath his retreating feet.
The youngest of the strangers frowned, eyes flicking between Walt's. He babbled something to his leader, who scowled and stopped to argue with the young man. It was too fast for Walt to follow, but every now and then he caught a word: alien, ship, doubt.
"What's going on?" Hannigan murmured.
Walt shrugged. "The young guy thinks you'd taste better boiled, but their leader says boiled meat loses its flavor."
The leader asked Walt a question. When Walt shrugged and shook his head, the man repeated one word, pointing at the sky.
"I don't get it," Walt said.
The young man who'd recognized him rolled his eyes. "He wants to know if you're the Starbreaker."
"You speak English?"
The man waggled his hand. "Some."
"Yeah," Walt said. "That was me."
The man spoke to his captain, who said something about Chichen Itza. The man turned to Walt and translated. "He asks if you're the Starbreaker, the man from Chichen Itza, then how many steps does it have?"
"Counting the top?" Walt said.
"Counting all."
"365," he said. "Just like the year. 91 on each side, plus the one at the top."
The man grinned and spoke to his leader, who gestured in a swooping, skeptical motion. The young man turned back to Walt. "Is that all of them?"
Walt flapped his hands. "I never counted how many were on the inside. That staircase is scary as shit. Always felt like the whole pyramid was going to close on me like a fist."
The two Maya spoke at length, interrupted by a third member who shouldered his gun and gestured as if stroking an invisible beard. After a minute, the young man looked to Walt.
"Where you going?"
"Puerto Aristo," Walt said. "Far southwest."
"They're taking your gifts. I'll show you the road. If they see you in the woods again, they'll shoot you."
Hannigan pounded Walt on the back. "Nicely done."
"What's this Starbreaker business, anyway?" Walt said to the young man. "You guys think I'm a demigod or something?"
"What are we, retards?" the man laughed. "It just sounds cool."
The other Maya took the coffee and salt and said goodbye to the young man, who led Walt and the others to a winding trail. As they stepped onto the relatively dry, uncluttered path, Hannigan's men grinned at Walt. Lorna gave him a look that might or might not have been significant. Walt winked.
Birds called from the branches. The young man swore and whacked his machete into a bright green snake curling across the trail. Hannigan picked up the corpse and coiled it into a grocery bag for dinner.
"Some of my friends say you flew to the ship," the young man said to Walt.
Walt snorted and yanked a thumb at his back. "See any wings?"
The man rolled his eyes. "With a plane."
"Sorry. No, it was a balloon."
"That's what I told them. I told them the aliens shot any planes that came near. They told me a balloon is too stupid."
Walt laughed. "They're probably right."
The young man looked ready to say more, then pointed ahead. "There it is."
Abruptly, it was there, a swath of asphalt bordered by encroaching grass and saplings. The young man pointed them southwest—Walt had already known that much, at least—then handed Walt a pen and a folded piece of paper that turned out to be blank.
"What's this?" Walt said.
The man's eyebrows crunched together. "Can I have your autograph?"
"What?"
"I'm sorry." He reached for the paper.
"No, of course," Walt said. "But if I see this on eBay, I'll hunt you down like a dog."
The young man blinked. Walt scrawled his name on the crumpled paper. Back when he used to see himself as the next Bukowski—a vision that had no evidence whatsoever besides a mutual affinity for beer—he used to dream about this moment, the signing of an autograph for a grateful fan. Those dreams usually involved chesty women and not short, watchful jungle-dwellers, but even so, it felt pretty damn good.
"Here you go."
The young man grinned and pocketed it. Hannigan rolled his eyes. Lorna gave Walt a small and unreadable smile.
"Told you I'd find the road," Walt said. "Now let's get a move on."
They managed a couple hours along the highway before Ken returned from scouting to let them know he'd found a tour lodge with a working well. Walt and Lorna stoked a fire while the others hauled up buckets of water to scrub off the jungle and refill their canteens. Once the smoke was boiling up the chimney, Walt filled his plastic bucket, headed a short distance into the twilight jungle, spread his tarp beneath him to keep away the worst of the crawlies, and rinsed off himself and his clothes. He dressed in his spare pants and brought the rest to the fire to dry off.
Gunshots pealed from the trees a quarter mile off, but the rhythm was all wrong for fighting, with as much as three seconds passing between shots. None of the men seemed alarmed. A few minutes later, Ken and one of the troops returned with a clutch of rats, already gutted. They placed them over the fire. Hannigan got the green snake out of his grocery bag and peeled the skin in one long tube. He laid the meat alongside the rats.
Walt didn't blink. He'd eaten far worse. At least it was cooked, and didn't have an exoskeleton—the hard little feet of crickets always stuck in his throat. Hannigan brought in oranges from the garden out back, long gone wild. He sliced them into wedges and passed them around while
the greasy, gamey smell of the meat permeated the too-warm lodge.
"You really did it, didn't you?" he said to Walt.
Walt spat a seed toward the corner. "I'm starting to wish I hadn't."
"Yeah? So they could finish the job? Wipe us out completely?"
"At least then I wouldn't have to hear anyone else accuse me of being full of shit."
Hannigan scratched his growing beard with his toothpick. "Did you have any idea what you were doing?"
"Not really, no," Walt laughed. "Still want me?"
"It's more need than want. It's complicated."
"You shoot them, they die. What's so complicated about that?"
"It's more than just us and the aliens," the man said. "There's another group, too. Gang-bangers. For all I know they've taken Long Beach by now. We need every edge we can get."
Walt wiped orange juice from his face. "Listen, that's tragic and all, but I'm not coming with you to shoot people."
"Our first concern is the aliens. You want to bow out after we get them under wraps, I'm sure the boss-man will send you on your way with a smile."
Fat sizzled from the other room. Walt nibbled the peel of his orange. It was bitter, but bitter was better than most flavors. "What's it like up there? Do you guys have government?"
Hannigan tugged his beard. "We got a president of sorts."
"How about electricity? Running water?"
"We built a wind turbine and a little solar. But without a proper grid, it's all messed up. You know what we use to grind flour?"
"What?"
The other man leaned in, smiling. "A watermill."
Walt spat out a piece of peel. "Really? Do you make the workers wear clogs? Those little square hats?"
"Square hats?"
"Wait, I'm thinking about windmills. The Dutch. Who I guess are just as dead as everyone else. Man, the next generation won't know what the hell we're talking about, will they? They'll be as alien as the aliens."
Hannigan shook his head. "We got a few young ones, but we don't got time to teach them the old ways. We got fields to farm."
"At least you're not starving. How's the rest of the country doing?"
"Not great. We get a few wanderers every now and then, but from what I hear, the whole nation's a ghost town."
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 75