"I'll bring you more tomorrow," Raina said. "Then see what else I can find."
Jill reached out, but she drew away. "Don't be so eager to get hurt. This won't be pretty."
It was too stupid to respond to. Jill offered them a tent in the canyon to sleep in. Raina let Martin lead her into the starlight and the crisp, dew-dust smell of the night.
"Come on," he said. "I'll buy you some tea."
"I don't want it."
"It's good. They make it with real milk."
She sighed; he thought he could make her feel better, but she no longer cared about tea at all. Martin walked up the hill and took the road down to its base, where candles flickered in the windows of the inn. A horse whickered. A torch crackled at the door to the McDonald's on the corner. Martin held the door for her. Inside, men and women stood around the counter holding foaming glasses and small tumblers of clear liquid. Martin settled Raina in a booth, went to the bar, and came back with two black mugs of opaque reddish-brown tea. It tasted like hot candy.
"See?" he said. "Good, right?"
"It's okay."
He stirred the little specks in his tea. "It'll be all right, you know. They're just scared of the raiders because nobody's stood up to them. Once we get enough guns, Jill won't hold back."
Raina doubted that—no one was ever willing to fight, not when their enemy was bigger or meaner or willing to hit first—but she was too tired and frustrated to argue. Resentfully, she drank her tea, which was very good.
At the candlelit bar, two men separated, glaring at each other. One of them was the man with the V-shaped grin, the man who'd made fun of Jill when Raina brought her the guns. He faced a bearded man who was half fat, half muscle, and half a foot taller.
"I said," said the man with the grin, "that you took my drink." He motioned at a glass on the bar. "This one is yours. You might identify it from the fact it is empty."
"So quit bitching and buy another," said the man with the beard.
"My thinking, which I feel is quite reasonable, is that you should buy me another."
"How about I give you yours back?" The bearded man snatched the empty glass, unzipped his pants, and hauled out his penis. The bartender gaped as the man urinated into the glass and, penis still dangling, sloshed it at the thin man, whose V-shaped grin had long since inverted. "Drink up, motherfucker."
The man squinted at the glass. "As long as we're getting to know each other, I've been fucking your wife. She's not very good."
The bearded man's face darkened. He stepped forward. The thin man slapped the glass from his hand, dousing the man in a rain of urine, and followed it up with a straight punch to his nose.
The other man bent halfway, roared, and straightened, blood flowing from his nostrils. He looped his fist at the smaller man, who had just enough time to look sad before the big man's fist slammed him to the ground. He tried to squirm away, but the other man punched him again, rattling his head against the sodden linoleum. The big man smiled, lifted his boot, and stomped the unmoving man's ribs.
Raina screamed loud enough that the whole room winced. She flung herself onto the big man's back, her longest knife flashing in her fist.
10
Walt threw himself flat as the earth slid beneath him. He hardened his fingers into claws and stabbed them into the dirt, but the dirt kept going away. His feet kicked into empty air. He went off the ledge.
He slid close to the rocky wall, shoes stubbing along its outcrops. A jutting rock bashed his chin. He groaned, pain exploding across his body. Something slid beneath his fingers. He grabbed on hard. His feet banged against the sinkhole wall.
"Help!" he shouted. "Lorna!"
Below, the tail of the rope splooshed into the vivid blue water. Walt shouted again, his voice hilariously faint in the chasm of the cenote. Well, this was terrible. If he slipped and fell to the water waiting forty feet below, there was no guarantee he'd be smashed to bits—most of these pools were dozens if not hundreds of feet deep—but there existed the chance he'd land wrong, knock the wind from himself, and quickly drown. Or sprain his shoulder, be unable to haul himself onto the rocks, and slowly drown. Or land fine, get halfway up the limestone face, find there were no handholds left, and finally, in his exhaustion, plunge back into the waters to tread water and drown slowest of all.
Generally speaking, it was not good to fall forty feet onto anything. So he shouted again, as loud as he could, groped for a higher hold, and pulled himself a foot up the wall. That put him about six feet from the rim, he figured. Five or six more holds until he flopped over the lip onto good, old-fashioned, not-moving flat land.
He only found two more.
Tantalizingly close to the top, the rock wall angled toward him, its surface forbiddingly flat. His fingertips scraped over stone, but he couldn't find a grip. Carefully, he edged laterally, toes probing, dislodging pebbles and snot-slick moss, but the climbing was no better over there. His biceps quivered. He tensed, preparing to leap up as high as he could and scramble for a new hold, but sanity prevailed. He held there, relaxing as well as he could to give his muscles a break.
"Son of a bitch," he panted.
Lorna's face appeared above the rim. "You've fallen."
"By one definition. By another, I've still got a long way to go."
"Can you get back up?"
"No. Tried. Give me a hand?"
She regarded him coolly, the way he might regard an unidentified beetle trundling up to him on the steps of Chichen Itza. "Do you think you'd die if you fell?"
"I think I fucking might!"
She nodded to herself, watching for another unbelievably long couple of seconds, then retreated behind the ledge.
"Hey!" he yelled. "I have a phobia about things that could kill me!"
His foot slid from the ledge. He swore and gasped, hanging tight as he tapped around, searching for a new foothold. A pair of jeans flapped over the edge, one pant leg hitting him in the face.
"Grab on," Lorna said.
He grabbed tight to the jeans, twisted his forearm to wrap the leg around his elbow, and tested his weight against it. He drew himself up by the jeans, found a grip for his left hand, lifted his right foot, searched for and found a new ledge. Lorna pulled the jeans tight. He hauled himself up to another set of holds. His chest scraped the upper edge. He wriggled up onto the wet grass and rolled on his back, gasping for air.
"Thank God," Lorna said.
"What do you mean, 'Thank God'? You acted like you wanted me to drop!"
She shook her head sharply. "I was thinking."
"Of me bashing my head into raspberry yogurt?"
"I panicked, Walt. Like you did at the beach."
"That was a perfectly level-headed tactical retreat." He searched her face. Her bare legs were folded beneath her. He tossed her the jeans. "What happened?"
"I don't know!" Her eyes went bright. She twisted her hands in her lap. "It should have been me, you know? How did I make it out when Hannigan was so much stronger? Or Ken, for that matter? They were real soldiers. But I'm the one who made it out. There you are on the ledge, and if you fall, all I have to do is follow you over. Make everything right."
"Shit." Walt stood up, staggered, and found his balance. "Nobody's dying today. Let's get back to camp and on the road."
He'd torn up his hands pretty bad on the rocks. Lorna poured some clean water onto a cloth and wiped away the dirt. He spread Neosporin, applying Band-Aids to the cuts and scrapes that looked likely to reopen.
Back on the road, she didn't speak. Except to suggest rests, neither did he. It was hot again. Big fucking surprise. Yet it wasn't the heat that was so bad. Sit around in the shade all day and you'd hardly notice. But get up and walk around, and you'd be miserable all day.
Meanwhile, they still hadn't found fresh water, they were rationing what they had left, and he'd lost his bucket. This wasn't a complete disaster—they were well out of the Yucatan, and he believed this part of the country had things
like "rivers" and "streams"—but he wasn't exactly the master of Mexican geography. He'd only come this way once. Years ago. When there had been a lot more farms. The jungle had regrown massively since then.
But not all the way. Rainy as the area might be, proper agriculture couldn't rely on something as fickle as the weather (and if the rain were that reliable, they'd want to exploit that, too). As he walked along the road, he kept one eye on the jungle, searching for rows among the trees, gaps in the canopy. After four false alarms and five hours of walking, he found what he was looking for: a concrete ditch half-hidden by a bank of shrubs. Its water was low and its sides silted, but it had a bit of current to it, and wasn't the green sludge he'd been expecting. He called a stop and asked Lorna to put together a fire.
"What, now?"
He considered the jungle. "You're right, we should probably unwind first. Think Seinfeld's on?"
"It's afternoon," she said. "Light illuminates things. Like smoke."
"So what? If we don't get the water boiled, next week we'll be shitting parasites so gnarly they'll make the aliens look like Elmo."
She snorted. "You're the one who's paranoid about being seen. If you're not concerned with being kabobbed by cannibals, neither am I."
"Look, I just don't want to go stumbling around a ditch at night," he said. "I've had enough of falling into water for one day."
Lorna tightened her mouth, ready to say more, then shook her head and smiled. "Just saying. I'll get the kindling."
He raised his eyebrows in exasperation, then got out his machete and started whacking at the wall of foliage blocking off the ditch. It was much too wet to burn and he flung the choppings in a messy pile. While he worked, Lorna set bark and grass at the base of a tree to flume the smoke away from unwanted eyes.
In addition to their canteens and jugs, they each carried a waterproof canvas water bag, with a third held empty in reserve in case they expected dry spells or damaged one of the others. Walt had found this one in the deserts of Northern Mexico. It was old and beaten and featured an illustration of an old-timey, Model T-ish car, and he was fairly certain it was a good seventy-plus years old, something 1930s motorists used to sling over the hood of their car on trips through Death Valley or Chihuahua. He'd seen cleaner, stronger bags since picking it up, but had hung onto it anyway. It was well-traveled. Good juju. Not the sort of thing you threw away.
He filled it and lugged it to Lorna, who had managed a small and smoky fire, which she stoked as he set up the pan to boil. The smoke tasted verdant and sharp.
"I'm going to wash up," Walt said. "I look like I stumbled in from 1970s Times Square."
He grabbed his soap and shampoo. At the mouth of the tunnel he'd carved through the brush to the canal, he stripped down to his hole-riddled jockeys, glanced over his shoulder, then ditched those, too. Insects thrummed from the trees. He climbed down the canal and stepped in to his ankles. It was mucky and slick but the water was warm. It was too murky to see the bottom, however, which was very troubling. He didn't like the idea of things swimming past him unseen. Especially the parts of him that would soon enter the water.
Well, whatever. It wasn't like he was getting so much use out of them anyway. He waded in ribs-deep, careful not to stub his toes. The canal leveled out. He ducked underwater and listened to the bubbles, then burst up and slicked water from his face.
Something darted between his legs. He yelped and dashed forward, falling awkwardly into the water, thrashing in panic. Behind him, Lorna laughed lowly. He started to yell at her, then took much greater interest in her bare hips and teardrop-shaped breasts; she had an athlete's body, any excess fat sweated away in the jungle. She strode forward, water closing over her navel.
"Do you always thrash around this much when you shower?" she said. "I hope your tub is made out of steel."
"Lately it's been made mostly out of ocean." He was already hard by the time she reached him. She pulled tight, legs brushing his under the sluggish, silty water. He rested his hand at the top of her ass. She moved in and kissed him, lowering her hand below the water.
After a minute, he pulled back. "Can we move it up to the shore?"
"Why?"
"Because I'd rather not have a piranha bite off my balls."
"We're a thousand miles from the Andes."
"Then how about the fact water makes terrible lube?"
She smiled darkly and ran her hand down his back. "Now that's a legitimate concern."
She turned and led him up the algae-slick curve of the canal, water dripping wonderfully down her back. As if she could feel his gaze on her skin, she turned and grinned.
* * *
That was the night they became a team. The panic she'd shown as he dangled over the cenote didn't return. Often, she was up before him, cleaning whatever they'd caught in the snares or packing fruit plucked from roadside trees. She smiled. She laughed. She talked. Not excessively—he got the feeling she wasn't much of a talker under any circumstances—but after the laconic, grief-stricken stranger he'd been traveling with the last couple weeks, it felt like living with the Micro Machines man.
She erased the physical distance, too. Sometimes the day's travel left them too tired to move, but most nights they made love or fucked or both, her cries competing with the nocturnal birds. He had missed it. Lots. She was more than just a warm body; she was a part of a team there, too, as dedicated to getting him off as he was to her. At times, she took it like a sporting challenge, and if he took too long she rolled him onto his back and straddled him with a look of renewed dedication and amused but friendly contempt.
The road began a gentle rise. After a few days, the jungle gave way at last, opening to low green hills under a too-warm sun. When they had to go off-road for water or to avoid strange towns, the thinner vegetation made for easier travel but tougher foraging. If anything, their progress slowed.
But they still made good time, crossing a hundred miles every three or four days. Bladelike ridges knifed from the horizon. They skirted villages, a few abandoned cities. There was no pattern to which places showed the smoke or noise of human life, but it was rare, and never organized. The census on his map was dated 2005 and claimed Mexico was populated by 106 million people. Something like half a million must have survived the Panhandler, but either the last five years had not been kind or the survivors had melted into the wilds, fleeing the attacks of aliens and their fellow former countrymen.
And then the road reached Mexico City.
It filled the whole valley between two mountain ranges, sprawling, endless, incredible, a gridded mass of labor and matter, some sections scorched to ruins, others pockmarked and cratered but largely intact. Sporadic towers spurted from the blanket of pastel houses and grim apartments. Snow lay on the mountains. Trees grew in the parks. It would have been smarter to go around, but Walt didn't have a choice. They were running low on food, and the more time they spent gathering it from the wilderness, the less time they had to travel. He entered the city, Lorna at his side.
Most neighborhoods could have been from any other big city on earth, gray-brown housing blocks fronted by shops with yellow signs. Walt's Spanish was good enough to recognize most of them and they were able to find weighty bags of long-term, durable food, the dry corn and wheat and beans that took extra prep time to mash, grind, or soak, but would stay edible as long as they kept them clean and dry. They supplemented this with cucumbers and peppers and avocados and strawberries from the parks and weedy backyard gardens.
Abruptly, even the most dour neighborhoods transitioned to bright, airy, gleaming places. A glass-fronted tower with a permanent scaffold of blue and red rectangles. A bizarre restaurant wrapped inside what looked like a wavy blue net, its interior paneled with solid bamboo, as if they'd stepped inside the forest's oldest trees. Yawning plazas with baroque churches capped with gold domes. Stone saints in dried-out fountains. Walt walked through one square blinking sudden tears. He hadn't thought much of Mexico, back in the day, dis
regarding it as cartel-racked and grossly impoverished, but despite the miles-wide slums, its capital was a jewel, an achingly beautiful tombstone to a people now departed.
Somewhere past its center, they took shelter in a tile-lined subway entrance to eat a toasted mash of avocados, corn paste, chilies, and wild Mexican oregano that Walt called waltcakes.
"I'm glad we came here," Lorna said.
Walt nodded, gazing across the way at a fountain headed by a faux-Aztec ziggurat complete with intricate pictographs of serpents and birds. "Are you Mexican? Were you? Wait, how do we talk about this now? Is Mexico still Mexico now that the Mexican government's gone? It's not like there's a patrolled border anymore. Mexicans and Americans can switch countries whenever they want. It's one big Amexada."
"My father was of Mexican descent. My mom was white."
"Oh. Ever been here before?"
"Why would I come to Mexico?"
He screwed up his face. "Friends? Family? A quest for the perfect cilantro?"
"My great-grandpa was the last born-in-Mexico Mexican in the family," she said. "This place wasn't any more special to me than Ireland would have been to you."
"I'm Scots-Norwegian," Walt said.
She shrugged. "Think either of those places exist anymore?"
"Just in myth," he said. "Same as here. Same as America. If we have kids, let's not tell them there were different countries."
"We're not having kids."
"Good. I never wanted them. Even in the halcyon paradise when you could summon a pizza to your front door. Parents couldn't get their kids to mow the lawn once a week. How would we motivate them to grind flour every day?"
"Violence?" Lorna smiled.
Walt crammed down the last of his avocado-cake. "How do you do it in L.A.? Some of you must have kids, right?"
"A few. They've adapted. Parents are less lenient now that not picking up your trash means being eaten by bears."
"I wonder what sucks more: being born into the wonderland and having it torn away from you as an adult, or growing up not knowing anything else?"
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 81