"At least American went out on top," Walt said. "Am I right?"
Hannigan gave him a look, then twitched his nostrils. "The rat's ready."
"I can't believe I consider that good news."
They ate. Split seven ways, there wasn't much meat to go around, the greasy little spears flavored with salt and pepper and a pinch of dried greens. Oregano? Thyme? It had been too long since Walt had either to remember. Whatever it was, after the slog through the jungle, it was good.
In the morning, they bottled all the water they could and set on down the road. Hannigan let one man range ahead and another trail behind. They were few enough and fit enough to do some jogging, padding along for ten or twenty minutes before one of them called for a slowdown. They made remarkable time—four to six miles per hour, sometimes more than fifty miles per day. It left Walt's feet in constant soreness, but his calluses prevented any major blisters.
He kept a sharp eye out for more tree-sign. Twice more, he had to detour into the jungle to circle around claimed territory. Once, they found an abandoned village, but all the dried food had long ago been eaten by rats and birds, and even the canned goods were useless, swollen with bacteria and botulism. Some of the gardens thrived and they spent a day harvesting bell peppers and potatoes and avocados and limes.
They passed a handful of real towns and cities, and three of the men made a desultory effort to get a car going, but they were rusted through by the tropical humidity, batteries dead for years. Probably all kinds of other shit wrong with them, too. Walt didn't know. Before the plague, he'd been a New Yorker.
It didn't matter. They emerged from the cover of the canopy four days later and followed the road through farmland gone to seed. The air was rich with pollen and salt. The horizon softened. A red crescent of sun sank into the sea.
"We left the boat a ways up north." Hannigan pointed past a pale cliff ten miles up the shore. "We'll camp here tonight, get to the ship and gear it up tomorrow, and shove off the day after that."
"How long's it been out here, a month?" Walt said. "I hope you hung onto your parking slip."
"We left a couple men with it."
"Hmm."
Hannigan eyed him. "Hmm what?"
"I wonder if we should be looking for more leather tarps."
They made camp in a farmhouse with a missing front door. Skeletons rested in three of the beds. A dog had gotten in at some point; sharded bone littered the floor, marrow cleaned out. The sun went down and they lit candles and ate potatoes baked the night before, which reminded Walt to check the kitchen for tinfoil. Tinfoil would be one of mankind's great losses. There might never be more of it, but it made a world of difference in keeping the grit and ash off your dinner. He lucked out and found a roll. Not that he expected to do a whole lot of cooking on the boat. Well, maybe they'd brought down a converted yacht or something. He added it to his pack.
He was plenty tired, but that made little difference to his body, which didn't seem to like the idea of closing its eyes on the desolate beach. After an hour of tossing, he got up, found his shoes, and wandered into the warm night. Insects buzzed from the boundary of the advancing jungle. Walt walked down the road until it dead-ended, then continued across the grassy dunes to the water's edge. A silhouette waited above the tideline. The moon and stars showed the man's gun.
"That you?" Walt called.
"Yep." Hannigan put the gun away. "Though if I'd known it was you, I wouldn't have bothered drawing down."
"Are you saying you could beat me down barehanded? I wouldn't argue. You look like shaved Donkey Kong."
"I used to play that game." The man grinned and spat into the surf. "What're you doing out here?"
"I think," Walt said, "that I'm scared."
"Scared?" Hannigan gestured to the starry night. "What's there to be scared of? Besides the panthers, pythons, and poisonous frogs?"
"Of Los Angeles. The aliens."
"After you damn near eradicated them?"
"Obviously I missed a few."
"Yeah, and they ought to be shitting their alien pants about you."
Walt snorted. "I was terrified the whole time I was on the ship. Anyway, the months of my life leading up to that point were pretty intense. I was in the right place for it. I haven't tangled with anything scarier than a barracuda in years."
"Barracuda are pretty nasty."
"I had a spear. And I think it was sick."
Hannigan scrunched his brow. "How do you know what a sick barracuda looks like?"
"Because when I cut it open it was more worms than meat."
"That's a thing I would rather not have heard." He tipped back his head and gazed at the shameless spread of stars. "Hard to believe something so pretty brought us something so nasty."
"Ah, those things don't care about us," Walt said, and instantly felt better about his place in the cosmos. "What brings you here?"
Hannigan shook his head at the sky. "Nothing."
"Then why don't you combine that nothing with another nothing and go to sleep?"
"It's my wife."
Walt glanced down the beach. "Married to the sea, are you?"
"She's out there on a mission of her own." Hannigan gestured vaguely. "I shouldn't complain. The world's still so far from safe. We ever want peace, we all have to absorb some risk."
"Be that as it may, how much would you pay for a cell phone right now?"
"You got one?" The man laughed. "Trade you for all the coffee beans you can carry."
Walt grinned, then walked down the beach until he got tired enough to sleep. The others got up early, clumping around on the hardwood floors. Walt woke groggy and angry. He supposed he could sleep on the boat.
They pan-fried bananas and boiled a few bivalves and small crabs someone had collected from the rocks. There was no proper walkway along the sea—turned out rural Mexican waterfronts were slightly less developed than Brooklyn boardwalks or the strands of Los Angeles—so they hiked along the grassy, hard-packed sand. Before the sun climbed to noon, they made their way around the northern cliffs where Hannigan had left the boat.
The sun beat down on an empty shore. Small gulls floated on the wind. Round gray birds waited for each wave to come to a stop, then darted into the foam and pecked at the water-softened sand. Walt shielded his eyes against the glare and got out his binoculars.
"Dude, where's your boat?"
"Must be further up," Hannigan said. "Around the next bend."
It wasn't. It lay in pieces across the shore, white foam lapping charred fiberglass and tangled rigging. A foot tumbled in the surf, bone sticking from a soggy calf, neatly sliced below the knee.
5
"Where did you go on your trip?" Raina said.
She stood at the railing, watching the fins of the dolphins arc through the waves. They weren't very playful today. No leaping or chasing. All business.
She had waited until they went out fishing together to ask her dad these things. She wanted to see what he said when her mom wasn't there. Parents were much better at lying to you when they were together.
"To stay with friends," he said.
"Did you have a good time?"
"Very."
A dolphin swam alongside the boat, turned on its side, and stared up at Raina. "Where do they live?"
"Up north," he gestured. "Along the bay."
"Close to the ship?"
"The mothership? Sure. You can see it from their front yard."
"They must be weird," she said.
Her dad laughed. "It's just a bunch of old metal."
He was wrong. And she thought he was lying. He reached for the crank to the winch. She picked up her club. When they finished and sailed home, she brought the coolers to her mom and lingered at the fire in the smell of woodsmoke and fresh fish.
"Where did you go the other day?" she said.
"Friends." Her mom glanced up from the grill's lattice and smiled. "They want to see you. Maybe another time."
"W
here do they live?"
She waved north. "Marina Del Rey, I think? I'm not really sure where the old borders are."
"How did you meet them?"
"At the Dunemarket. Couple months ago. I swear I see new faces every time we go there."
Raina went around front to wash up, suddenly doubtful of herself. But two days later, she came back from the ruins and didn't let the screen door slam. She caught her parents by surprise in the kitchen; her dad saw her and stopped mid-sentence. He grinned at her, eyes lined with lies.
Raina went to the mall to talk to Martin, but he wasn't there. She walked downhill past the park where the skeletons sprawled from vast concrete pipes. She didn't know what the pipes had been for—they were big enough to funnel torrents of stormwater, but they didn't lead anywhere—but they had wound up as mass graves.
A flock of parrots flew past, red heads vivid atop their green bodies, cackling madly. She hid behind a tree and waited for them to go away. You couldn't trust a thing that laughed at the dead. Once it was safe, she trotted through the silent houses. Most were fenced, but their pickets and chain-link hadn't been able to keep out the only thing that mattered.
Martin and his mother lived on the south coast in a house that looked like a shrunk-down fairy-castle. Statues of angelic babies grew mossy in the yard. A high, peaked roof cast plenty of shade. There was no one out front, so she peeked through the porthole cut into the door to the side yard. Martin was down on the beach with a weathervane flapping in the wind.
"Hey," Raina said, padding through the sand. "Did your mom leave on a trip last week?"
Martin glanced up from a little black box connected to the vane by a string. "How'd you know that? Are you always stalking me?"
"Because I think they're planning to stand against the men from Catalina." She explained how her neighbors left at the same time as her parents, about the stranger on the road, and the single question he'd asked Wendell. "They're lying. They're lying but I can't prove it."
"Wait, they want to fight? What should we do?"
She gazed at him steadily. "Help them."
"That's crazy. We'll get killed."
"My parents are already involved. Already in danger. I won't sit by while they risk their lives."
Martin wiped his nose on his sleeve and twiddled a knob on the little black box. "I might have something for you. Watch my stuff while I go get it."
He set the box on the weathervane and ran through the yard to his house. She stared at the weathervane's churning wind-cups. Did he expect a shark to wallow up on the sand and eat it whole? Martin was strange. He worried too much about the wrong things. He came back a minute later and handed her a black device riddled with buttons.
"What's this?" she said.
"A tape recorder." He grinned. "So you can hear what they talk about when you're not around."
"It still works?"
"A lot of the purely mechanical stuff does. This one was probably ten years old before the plague hit. All you do is push these buttons." He clicked down two of them at once, then showed her how to shut it off. "The tape only records for an hour. You'll have to set it when you know they'll be alone together."
She tried the buttons for herself. "What about the batteries?"
"I put in good ones."
"What if they run out before I catch them?"
His face crumpled. "I don't have many good ones, Raina."
"What are you going to use them for? Is it more important than my parents' lives?" She held out her hand. "I'll bring them back if I don't use them up."
"You have to look for more for me, too."
"Fine."
He nodded unhappily and ran back to the house, reemerging with a clear plastic sleeve of four. She put them in her pack and wrapped her spare shirt around the tape recorder.
"I'll try not to drop it."
"Don't!" he said, reaching out.
She laughed and walked home. Out of sight beyond the trees, she got out the recorder and clicked it on and off, murmuring into it, testing it. Hearing her own tinny voice was uncanny, as if she were long dead and listening to her own captured spirit.
Her parents made a ritual of brushing and flossing their teeth before bed; except in the winter, they did this out back, where they could spit into the yard. Raina used the time to hide the recorder in their room. The first night she got nothing but the noise of the tape itself, a faint hiss like a wave forever sweeping up the shore. She had started taping too early. The second night she heard low murmurs and then laughter and fleshy smacks and moans. She listened for two minutes, then fast-forwarded; when she started it up again, they were speaking. She rewinded to the beginning of the conversation, which was dreamy and largely inaudible, clusters of words fighting to be heard from beneath the chair cushion Raina had zipped the tape recorder inside.
"...worried..." her mom said. "...so wild..."
"Not wild," her dad said. "Independent...fine."
"That's what worries...even need us?"
"These days? ...hope not." He coughed. "...showed her she doesn't have to live like some..."
Her mother laughed. "...had to cut the dirt off with an axe. Oh well. She'll be..."
The rest was indistinguishable. The recorder shut off with a click.
The third night Raina heard goodnights and the thunk of a glass set on a table. The fourth night she set the recorder wrong and taped nothing at all. On the recording of the fifth night, she could hear them crisply—she had snuck the tape recorder into the bookshelf, and learned to turn the volume all the way up. Aside from the constant low hiss and occasional warble of the tape, she could hear them as easily as if she'd been crouched in the room herself.
"When do you leave?" her mom said.
Her dad grunted. "Three days."
"Same as before?"
"Yeah. Bryson's."
"What this time?"
He chuckled. "What do you think?"
"Is that even plausible?"
"If we can make it look like an accident."
Her mom was quiet for a while. "It sounds dangerous."
He laughed. "You think it sounds dangerous to sabotage a gang of heavily armed killers?"
"My question is why it can't be someone else."
"It is someone else," he said. "It's half the shore. Listen. It's this or we leave."
"I know."
"After the tribute, we're barely making ends meet. We don't have enough left to trade. That means old clothes. No shot at gasoline. No medicine—"
"I know," her mom said.
Her dad gentled his voice. "I don't want Raina growing up in this. We either leave or get rid of them. I don't think starting over in this world is any less dangerous than fighting for what we've already built."
Her mom got very quiet. "I know."
"I love you."
"Yeah, yeah."
The wet noises followed. Raina clicked off the tape. The screen door banged closed. She pocketed the tape recorder and went to the kitchen, where her dad took hard flatbread from the counter and dusted it with salt.
"I want to go with you to see Bryson," she said.
He set down the salt shaker. "Bryson who?"
"Bryson who's going to attack the Catalinans."
"God damn it. Did your mom tell you that?"
She shook her head. "I listened."
He tipped back his head and stared at the ceiling, hands on his hips. "You are the sneakiest little rat. What did you do, hide outside the window?"
She smiled. Rats didn't reveal their secrets. "I want to help fight them."
"Then you're going to be a disappointed little girl."
"I'll follow you to Bryson's."
"So I won't go." He raised his eyebrows. "You don't like them, do you? The islanders?"
She stared right back at him. "I hate them."
"Then stay out of this. Don't try to follow me. Don't try to help. If you do anything to put yourself in danger, I'll cut my involvement on the spot."
<
br /> Anger shook up from her bones. "That's not fair."
"Fair." He turned to the window. "I should ground you."
"What's ground me?"
"It's what parents used to do to kids who were having too much fun." He laughed, then covered his mouth.
She glared at him, fists clenched. "If it's that important, we should all help."
"What's important is that you have a future. The kind of future we imagined when we took you in." He raised his tanned and rope-roughened hands, silencing her. "This isn't a discussion. Bring it up again, and I'll never see Bryson again."
Raina glared more, but it did about as much good as she expected. She got to hear about their talk again when her mom got home from Wendell's. Her dad left three days later and her mom hung by her shoulder, watching, refusing to let her stray from the yard. Raina thought about going anyway—her mother couldn't stop her physically, and unless the woman nailed the windows shut and stood over her all night, she had no way to keep Raina in bed. But unless she made an offering to the moon, it would be hard to track her dad's cold trail, and if she tried, it would mean her mom would wake to the knowledge she had a husband who couldn't protect her and a daughter who didn't respect her.
Instead, Raina decided to work harder, to fill the cellar with canned perch and mussels, to mend the nets and scrape the hull, to prove she was no longer the child she'd been when they found her. He had decided to fight after all. If he wouldn't let her help directly, she could still pitch in by freeing up his time to prepare with the other rebels.
She brought the tape recorder and the two batteries she hadn't used back to Martin. The men came with their boats twice more. The nights grew less cold while the spring days turned blustery and rainy. Green sprouted from the garden. Her dad left once or twice per week, spending as much time away from the house as he did in it. Her mother went with him every second or third trip and they warned Raina to stay near the house and out of sight of strangers.
The men came again, extracting their portion of food and fuel from her father. By now it was a routine. Neither side needed to speak, though sometimes Trig—the man who'd carried the club—tried to needle her father. He never gave any sign he'd heard.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 76