The raiders shoved off from the pier. Just a week later, they returned.
"Run," her dad told her. She pounded down the planks of their dock. A gunshot cracked the sky above her head and she skidded to a stop on the salt-worn wood. In the boat's prow, Trig pointed a rifle at her middle. He bobbed with the swells as the other men trimmed sails and guided the boat in to rest.
The tall bald man was the first off the boat. He smiled at her dad, deep folds warping the sun-worn skin around his eyes and mouth.
"We're here for your guns," said the man. "Don't make me take more than things."
Trig smiled at Raina. Her dad swabbed sweat from his brow. "We don't have any guns around here."
The bearded man barked. "And I have no lice. Give me your guns and don't make me do evil."
Her dad bulged his cheek. "Seems to me I'm not in much position to make you do anything."
"That's because you chose to have children instead of soldiers." He flipped his hand toward the yard. "Search the house until it feels used."
Trig laughed and jumped to the dock. Ten more men joined him, jarring the planks, bumping past Raina with the smell of sweat and sea. Their boot heels yanked grass from the yard. Her father grabbed her by the upper arm. The men filed inside their house. Wood thumped; glass smashed. The home went silent. Her mother emerged, wide-eyed, teeth bared. Raina's dad glanced at the man with the beard, who ignored him, then pulled Raina across the dock. In the sandy grass, he put his other arm around his wife, holding her in place while the soldiers tore their home to the floor.
The islanders came out with two shotguns, two pistols, and the rifle with the scope, along with a duffel bag sagging with ammunition. They set it all at the bearded man's feet.
He squinted. "Is that it?"
Her father's sad smile confirmed it. "Is there anything else you'd like? My shoes? My teeth?"
The big man stooped, arms spread as if he would rip the dock up by the roots, then picked up the rifle and fitted it to his shoulder. He aimed at a pelican wafting on the thermals, tracking its slow drift.
"Just the one rifle? What if it broke?"
"I don't suppose I'd notice," her dad said. "We never used it."
The man shook his head and rose. "My God, man, you've got to think of your future." He gestured at the boat and the men picked up the guns and took them onboard. "Although it's moot now. Firearms are henceforth banned from the mainland without express writ by King Me. The penalty for unlicensed ownership of firearms shall be death by firing squad."
"What if raiders come?" her mother said, voice shaky and hot. "What should we do, reason with them?"
The man snorted. "We'll protect you."
"While you're safe on your island?"
"Then we'll avenge you." He raised his thick brown eyebrows and leaned down until his gaze was level with hers. "I see what happens on my land."
He turned and hauled himself up the rope ladder to the boat. The house was a mess of shattered glass and scattered papers and upturned drawers. Raina helped sweep the broken water jugs from the garage into a pile and then buried it in the pit in the back where they put the things that couldn't be mulched or burned. They folded away the last of the clothes by candlelight.
Raina left in the night. In the morning, she was the first one up, and went out to scrape salt from the tarps while her parents boiled and drank their tea. Her mom walked uphill to speak to Wendell. Her dad went to the shack by the dock and sat down to mend the net. Raina brought him a small walnut box. He frowned and took it, hands dropping under its unexpected weight. Metal skittered across wood. He slid his fingernails under the lid and removed it. A revolver sat beside red boxes of bullets.
He gaped. "Where did you get this?"
"From a dead man," she said.
He touched the grip. "We shouldn't have this."
"I can get more. Everyone can have one."
Her dad looked up sharply. "No more. You can't be found with these."
"How are you going to fight back without any guns?"
"That's for us to worry about. If I catch you with one of these again, your only worry will be what it's like to spend the rest of your life locked in the trunk of a car." He winced and lowered his gaze to the box, which he refused to set down. "We'll bury it. In case there's trouble. Do not bring back another. You hear?"
She nodded, but he'd taken this one. He yielded. It was what he did. Raina had seem him yield to her mom for a long time and assumed that was what husbands did—bow to the wind, then straighten once it calmed—but he yielded to the Catalinans, too. Even when they hurt her mom. Each time they pressed, he bent. Each time he bent, they came back and pressed harder. Someday he would break.
Unless she pressed back and straightened him out.
She went to bed. She knew from the tapes her parents never stayed up longer than an hour after lights-out. She waited just longer than that, then got up and got her two biggest bags and her travel kit. She crept across the wooden floors in her socks, then put on her shoes outside, where the air smelled like old seaweed and fresh crabs. She cut north up the hill past the ruins of the manors. The signs along the winding road warned her to watch out for horses. The first time she'd seen these, she'd been excited, but there were no horses left.
Often the woods were so deep she saw nothing but trees. A tall wooden fence rose from the wilderness. She climbed through the hole she'd dug underneath it. Behind a screen of grass and weeds, a brick house sat beneath an umbrella of strong-smelling pines. Raina clicked on her flashlight and went to the shed around back and pulled the carpet away from the trapdoor. Before descending, she drew her symbol between her collarbones, tracing a circle, then bisecting it down the middle. She needed its help. The bunker was a bad place.
It was a liar. It had promised the man who built it safety, but caught in the beam of her flashlight, he was as dead as the TV in the wall across from his bed. Half-mummified in the dry, cool air. Jaw hanging open. Lips shrunken from his teeth, which were parted as if in the middle of a silent, stupid groan. Crusty brown spots stained his sheets and the thin carpet, but when Raina had first sniffed them—she hadn't wanted to, but something made her, the same way it used to make her poke dead dogs with sticks—they hadn't smelled like scat. They were bloodspots. He'd set up his fortress and died like all the others.
Which meant this place was hers for the taking.
Some of the cans on the pantry shelves bulged with mold, and most of the cereal and chips tasted stale despite never being opened, but no mice or bugs had gotten inside, and the bags of rice were clean and white. The goods in the adjoining room hadn't been used, either: great racks of paper towels, toilet paper, disinfectant, batteries, soap, shampoo, medicine in nicotine-brown plastic bottles. All of it right there. The armory was lightly dusty but just as untouched.
Rifles stood in wooden racks. Pistols hung on pegs. She knew very little about guns. Except the three times her dad had made her practice with the rifle, she had never fired one, even during the year she'd been alone, because guns made noise, and when you made noise, bad things came for you. Men appeared in windows. The shrieking ships creased the sky and let loose monsters that never tired.
The true way was to become a shadow. To disappear with the daylight. To walk behind without being seen. That was why she liked knives. They were cold and metal and silent and they reminded her to hide in the cracks and strike when the back was turned.
She'd left the bunker virtually untouched, but not from fear or respect of the dead. The dead were there to feed the living. This was the lesson of mushrooms and maggots. She had left it be because of the lesson of squirrels, which she had often stolen fruits and nuts from: when there is plenty, leave it buried. With her new mom and dad, she'd had no need for food or weapons. The man with the beard had changed that.
She picked bullets from the red and green boxes and fit them to the guns to know they were right. On its own, a bullet was light, but in boxes of fifty they weighed her d
own like little anchors. She took four rifles and two pistols and two boxes of bullets for each, got packages of unworn white t-shirts from the room next to the pantry, and wrapped them around the guns so they wouldn't clank or break. She hiked the long pack up her back and swept the flashlight around the corners of the room to make sure the shadows fled from her, then turned her back and climbed the metal steps. She locked the door behind her.
It didn't feel good to be traveling with something so heavy, but the night was still late, and she walked home in thick darkness. She took the road to the top of the hill and then slipped off the shoulder to cut through the trees and tall grass. She paused once at a clearing to gaze down at her house.
Its windows were as dark as the bay. She hoisted the bag and continued down the hill. Her father had taken the revolver. He would take these, too, because of what the men from Catalina had done to Raina's mother and to him, and he would pass them to his friends and ask for more. Soon, the bay would be free.
She should have known better than to think about the future. The future was a shadow, too. If you were arrogant enough to think you could see its shape, it smiled and slipped the knife between your ribs.
A flashlight snapped on from the pines a few yards to her left. "Stop right there!"
She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the glare.
"I said stop! Hands in the air and freeze!"
Raina lifted her hands. The man turned and shouted to someone uphill, illuminating himself with the flashlight. He had a burn scar on his left cheek, which he'd failed to conceal with a haphazard beard. He was one of the soldiers, one of the men who'd taken the guns from her father.
Raina tensed. The guns pulled on her shoulders with drowning weight.
6
The severed foot surged up the shore on a white tide of foam. The wave pulled away, beaching it on the yellow sand. The bone was cut cleanly, ringed with black on its severed tip.
Walt looked up and gazed across the windswept water. "We have to go."
Hannigan knelt and touched the sea-slick hair on the bodyless calf. "We aren't doing a damn thing until we search for survivors. Find out who attacked us."
"Do you see that bone?"
"No. No, I don't."
"What?" Walt said. "It's right there. The white thing sticking out of the gross thing."
"I see the man it was a part of." Hannigan rose and drew his pistol. "And I aim to avenge him."
"The only thing you're aiming to do is confuse the next local when he stumbles over your foot." Walt jerked his thumb uphill at the shrubs screening the beach. "The boat's gone. We have to get out of here."
"I want two on the beach keeping watch. Everyone else searches."
Two of Hannigan's men waded into the surf, shoulders swaying, and reached for the flotsam swirling in the ceaseless waves. Ken knelt and wrapped the strap of his rifle around his forearm and peered far out to sea.
"Shit," Walt said. "I'm going to head up the hill and get a better view."
Hannigan nodded absently and strode into the water, jerking his knees high to avoid the worst of the waves. Walt turned his back and jogged up the dune to where the grass sprouted from the sand. Three trees deep into the burgeoning jungle, he crouched down and watched. Soldiers staggered through the surf and pulled the wreckage up to shore. He felt suddenly foolish and ashamed in a way he hadn't encountered in a long time. Brush snapped to his left. He gasped and ran deeper into the jungle, swatting at broad leaves and low branches.
A man screamed in fear. Walt whirled. Through the thicket of green, the shoreline boiled. A blue bolt lanced across the water and cut the scream short. Walt lurched forward, ankle turning on the muddy ground. He limped through the pain. Rifles banged and roared. Men wailed. The surf sighed. Very soon, it went dead quiet. He heard nothing but his own ragged breathing.
His ankle creaked and he dropped like a rock. He balled up in the wet grass and slick dirt, grasping at his foot. Leaves shuffled. Walt got out his gun and went still.
Lorna crept from behind a curtain of fronds, face frozen in panic. She passed within eight feet. The green swallowed her up.
Walt gritted his teeth. "Lorna!"
She made a quavering noise. "Who's there?"
"Walt. I'm back here."
She swung into view, breathing in quick jerks. "What's happening?"
"Aliens. You need to run. If you hear one coming, drop and freeze until it goes away."
"What are you doing there?"
"Leg's hurt," he said. "I'm kind of stuck here."
"I don't know the way." Lorna gestured to the wall of trees. "I'm staying with you."
Walt pressed his knuckles to his forehead. He should have let her go without a word. "That's not a great—"
Something heavy sloughed through the grass. An irregular patter of steps followed. Walt bugged his eyes and gestured her down. Lorna glanced back, mouth agape, then crushed herself beside him beneath the bushes. He hovered his mouth over her ear.
"Don't. Move."
The thing sloughed nearer. A gray shape clarified from the ferns and trunks, seven feet tall, a scramble of wavering, snaky limbs and hard, spidery legs. Two fist-sized eyes bulged from an oval head. Silver tools winked from its pincers. It slid past, tentacles whispering in the muck.
Lorna shuddered. Walt clamped an arm around her, pinning her still. A second creature followed, two thick tentacles bobbing above its head, oscillating side to side like long, lumpy radar dishes. Walt knew he could bellow the National Anthem in perfect safety—the things were as deaf as a stump—but he couldn't make himself speak until the rasp of their passage faded into the trees.
"We're just going to stay here a while," he murmured.
"What if they come back?"
"Then that's how we know they truly love us."
"What?"
"Keep playing possum. That's our best chance."
She gave him a look like he'd just swallowed a live and very warty toad, but she stayed put. His ankle throbbed. Something crawled across his neck and he stiffened against the instinct to slap it. Lorna's breathing slowed against him. A long time later, distant appendages trudged overlappingly toward the beach.
Lorna lifted her head once they were gone. "Are they gone?"
Walt stared at the horrendous orange caterpillar undulating along the underside of the leaf above his face. "While longer."
After another couple minutes, he glanced toward the beach, saw plenty of jungle, and got the duct tape from his bag to wrap a long strip around his ankle. He was no doctor—although if he decided he was, there weren't exactly any boards around to challenge his qualifications—but he was pretty sure the tape would help. He glanced around for a straight and sturdy branch.
Lorna gestured beachward. "We have to help them."
Walt looked up from his work. "If you think that's a good idea, it's no wonder you need my help."
"And you think it's a good idea to just leave them there?"
"Hang on a minute." Walt trimmed the twigs from a thick stick and used a pair of shoelaces to lash a short, fat crossbar to one end, forming a crooked T. "This is weird. Like, highly coincidental. Any chance they followed you from L.A.?"
"Why would they do that?"
"Maybe you weren't the only ones looking for me."
She tore her gaze away from the direction of the beach and met his eyes. "How would they know to find you here?"
"They're aliens. For all I know, they know my Social Security number and that the first CD I bought was Kris Kross." He thumped his improvised stick against the ground, testing its handle. It could function as a short crutch, a long cane, or, if things got truly desperate, as a pretty good club. "Okay, let's get out of here."
Lorna gestured at his crutch. "I thought you were getting ready to help them."
"Help who, the dead people? Do you think they need us to tell them how to lie there?"
Her mouth swung open. "We have to do something!"
Walt laughed
"You just spent two hours lying in the dirt. By now they'd have bled out from a paper cut. You didn't go down sooner because you knew there was nothing to be done."
She lurched forward, hand hardening into a fist. "What a hero. Sitting there in your own filth."
She hunkered down and crept toward the beach, vanishing behind the crush of stems and leaves. Her feet swished through the undergrowth. After a minute, he heard nothing but the whir of insects. A minute longer, a long, pained scream ripped through the moist air. Walt flinched. The bugs droned on.
Leaves stirred on the ground. Walt went still, pistol held on his knee. Lorna wandered to a stop in front of him, her face as frozen as the caterpillar's still eating the leaf above his head.
"I thought you'd been shot," Walt said.
"They're gone."
"Back into the water, probably. They look like they could survive there fine."
"Hannigan. Ken. Reynolds. My people. There's nothing left but sand and blood."
Walt moved his blunt black pistol to his pocket. "I'm sorry."
Her eyes brightened. "How did you know they were coming?"
"The leg on the beach was cut off with a laser. In my experience, that's a general hallmark of a non-human presence."
There wasn't much more to say. He used the crutch to lever himself to his feet, then started back into the jungle. His ankle hurt, but supported by the stick, he could walk well enough to get by.
Lorna followed. "Where are you going?"
"Away from the monsters who may have been trying to kill me. Ideally to someplace with a roof. If I'm very lucky, there will be a bed."
"Nothing's changed."
"Except the transportive qualities of the boat that was supposed to get us there. And the lifelike properties of everyone who was supposed to go with us. Alone on foot from here to California?"
He walked on. Wordless, she followed. When he looked back, her face was wild and tear-damp, infinitely more wretched than her silence would indicate. He paused a few times to rest his ankle and listen to the jungle. Sometimes the birds shut up when big mean things were moving around, but he didn't hear any eerie silences. Either the birds were too stupid to recognize an alien when they saw it, or he wasn't being followed.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 77