"Yeah. Listening."
"We have access to guns. Lots of them. I offer them to you if you'll quit stealing from everyone."
The man laughed through his nose. "No."
"Listen, you don't have to stop robbing everyone. Just the people heading to Dunemarket. We can set up badges for them or something."
"We've got guns. What do you think my people used to capture you?"
"Yeah, but you can have more." Mauser wandered closer to the dais. "Dozens. A couple hundred. With ammo. You can then sell those for whatever you want."
Preston swung his legs off the bed. They were bare. A sheet covered his pelvis and upper thighs. "And you want me to stop holding up those Dunemarket peddlers."
"That's all."
Preston sniffed, scratched his chest, and pointed at Raina. "I want her instead."
"No you don't," Mauser said stiffly. "She's the type to cut off your balls in your sleep."
"Sleep? That's why God invented meth."
Raina went very still. So did Mauser. Martin ran in front of her and barred his arms.
"No!"
Preston smiled slowly and stood. The sheet fell away. He wore nothing underneath. "Are you defying me in my own house?"
Raina whicked out her knife. "Get away from me. I'll split your dick in half."
"I like that mouth." He raised his hand and made a come-here gesture. The woman and the two men advanced down the pews, boots clomping.
"Why are you listening to that shitty little TV?" Martin said, voice quavering.
Preston cocked his head. "Huh?"
"You're listening to the built-in speakers. The bass on those couldn't spook my little sister. Meanwhile, you're letting those go to waste." Martin pointed to the wood-paneled speakers at the back of the dais. They were as tall as Preston. He pointed up at the smaller speakers set into the corners of the ceiling. "I can patch all those in for you. All I need is a couple of tools and a couple of hours."
The interest faded from the man's face. He bent over the bed at a regrettable angle, retrieved the little TV, and lobbed it at Martin. "I can wire up some speakers, man. But this thing is battery-powered. Cabs back there run on juice."
"So what? You've got solar panels up on the roof. Might even be a battery for them in the attic."
"You know solar?"
"Sure. Let me take a look."
"Hold up," Mauser said. "In exchange for stopping the attacks on the travelers."
"Nope," Preston said. "Here's how it is. You rig up my speakers, I let everyone walk out of here with their hymens intact."
"That's not much of a deal. That's the same state we walked in here. Figuratively speaking."
The naked man stepped down the dais and leaned his forehead closer to Mauser's. "Sounds like a pretty fucking good deal to me, man."
"It's a deal," Martin said. "Just don't touch her."
"Want her for yourself, huh?" Preston flipped his hand at the woman. "Come upstairs with us. Dave, Hector, you keep these two right here."
He yanked the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around himself toga-style, then brought Martin and the gunwoman through the back door. Dave and Hector stared at Raina and Mauser.
"Your commander," Mauser said. "He's a bit demanding, isn't he?"
The men went on staring. Mauser glanced at Raina, who said nothing.
"Can we at least sit down?" he went on. "I'm not sure my heart can handle the strain of waiting around for someone to finish an electrical job."
Hector tipped back his head, then nodded at the pews. They sat. The gunmen took up a pew behind them. Time stretched on and on. Raina wasn't bored. She was thinking. They were going to leave emptyhanded. To get results for Jill, they would have to find other Osseys and kill them. She didn't like that plan. It was a bad plan. It was dangerous, especially now that they'd already come to speak to Preston; if some of his men turned up dead two days later, he might connect it to them. Come hunting for them. Even if he were too stupid to tie the events together, she would have to attack armed men. She could be hurt.
Mauser made occasional jabs at conversation. Dave didn't reply. Hector mumbled with him sometimes. Raina went on thinking.
There had been a lot of dogs after the plague. Hungry. Scared. Unused to hunting on their own. She had been much smaller then, and she must have looked like easy meat, because sometimes the meaner ones harried her, especially when they were in a pack. But they could be useful, too. They had good noses that led them to food. When she heard claws clicking down the street, she got her knife and followed. If the dog were small enough, she could scare it away from its meal—a dead gull, a garden she hadn't known about—but sometimes she shared, too, so the dog would like her, and let her follow it again. There had been one little black dog with big pointy ears that she'd run with for months. She'd called it Dog. Then it disappeared.
The others weren't as nice. One day she had heard claws and gone from beneath the dogs to find a muscly pup with a broad, flat snout trotting down the pier. It gave her a look and growled and jogged on. Its ribs poked from its skin like the masts and hulls of the boats sunk at the marina. She followed at a distance. It sniffed the doors of the French-Japanese restaurant, then the walls of the old seafood eatery where the empty shells of five hundred dead crabs lay piled in tanks long evaporated.
The dog stopped and lowered its head and flattened its ears. In the doorway of an arcade with clowns and stars painted on the wall, a large brown and black dog with a long, pointed tail bared its teeth. Between its paws, a half-chewed fish sprawled across the gum-spotted concrete, huge and silver, limp enough to still be fresh.
The snub-nosed dog circled the dog with the fish, growling, a stripe of fur raising along its spine. The dog with the fish lunged and snapped. The snub-nosed dog juked away, then nipped at the other dog's side. They exploded into snarls, fangs flashing, butting heads and necks, the scrum carrying them both down the pier.
Raina ran in and grabbed the fish. She climbed the stairs to the roof of the arcade, where she ate it. After the dogs finished fighting, one too wounded to stand, she ate the loser, too.
This was the lesson of the lesser dog: all violence is risk. Even the smallest dog can win if it encourages the strong dogs to take all the risk for themselves.
Outside, the sun rose to noon, rays deflecting weakly through the church's narrow windows. Footsteps banged down a staircase. Preston kicked open the rear doors. He was dressed in one of the black shirts with the silver pirate. Martin was behind him, dusty and sweaty, hair poking up in tufts.
Preston grinned a victorious grin. "Let's kick this shit up."
He strode to the back corner of the dais and twiddled a black box of dials and switches. He straightened and gazed dumbly at the ceiling's ribbed beams. Noise thundered from all sides. Raina balled up on her pew. Guitars thrashed. A man gurgled demonically. On the dais, Preston laughed, drowned out by the music, and banged his head.
He clicked off the speakers and punched Martin on the shoulder. "Right on, man. You're a wizard."
Martin smiled, blushing. "It was just patching a few wires into the battery array."
"And knowing how to do that shit in the first place." Preston rubbed his nose and narrowed his eyes. "Maybe I should keep you around."
"For Pete's sake," Mauser said. He rose, drawing glances from Hector and Dave. "You got a boss set of speakers out of the deal. Probably have lights, too, yes? Air conditioning? We can all walk away happy. Don't get greedy."
Preston jutted his jaw and thumbed his upper lip. Martin looked to Raina for help. She didn't know whether she'd run or fight.
Preston nodded, sparing her the decision. "Yeah. Okay. Get out of my joint. If I see you back here, I take whatever I want."
"As ever, your graciousness is without equal." Mauser took hold of Raina and Martin and shepherded them from the church, followed by Preston's soldiers. The sunlight was hard and sharp. Raina glanced back. From the top steps, Preston grabbed his crotch and mad
e a kissy-face.
"Sorry about that," Mauser said. "Dude's gotten more full of himself since I last saw him. The price of success is arrogance, isn't it?"
"That guy was a jerk," Martin said.
"I know. Why do I always think they'll be willing to talk? No one talks these days. All they do is push you around." He kicked a rock down the sidewalk. "If Jill really does wipe out the islanders, promise me you'll make her come for these assholes next."
"So what now?" Martin glanced back and lowered his voice. "We kill a couple of them and bring them back to Jill? Isn't that murder?"
Mauser shrugged. "I don't think they'll put you on trial for murdering snakes."
"No," Raina said slowly. The idea had come to her so clearly it must have been a suggestion from the spirits. Almost certainly a cat. Only cats could conceive such sadistic plans as this. "We'll take care of them all at once."
"Huh?" Mauser scowled at her. "Raina, the ones you saw in the church were just a fraction of the gang. There's no way we can fight them."
"We won't," she said. "We'll make the Catalinans do it for us.”
12
Getting a car wasn't as easy as that, though. If it were, they might have done it long ago—that is, if the roads in the jungle weren't snarled with branches, trees, and other cars, or if Walt weren't still suspicious that an engine-hunting alien flier could pop over the horizon at any time to vaporize them, or if he weren't at least a little concerned that human jungle-dwellers might roll out a trap as soon as they heard a car rumbling down the road.
In other words, there were lots of safety-related reasons why they'd come all this way on foot. But there were practical and logistical ones, too. Like the fact there might not be a single working vehicle in the entire metropolis of Zacatecas, and if there were, it would almost certainly have an owner.
"First things first," Walt said. "Where are we going to get a working battery? Can we find a brand-new one? Will it still have a charge?"
"Generator."
"Eh?"
She stared. "Don't you know anything about cars?"
"I'm a New Yorker," he shrugged.
"Then it's a good thing you're shacked up with a born-and-raised Angelino. You can use a generator to jump-start a car. Same way you'd use another battery."
He swabbed sweat from his forehead. "Where do we get a generator? When the Panhandler hit, generators were probably the number one cause of Home Depot-related murder."
"And almost everyone who took one died in the plague."
"Leaving their generators to be taken years ago by anyone who did survive."
She glared at him, as if it were his fault humanity had been reduced to a pack of rag-donning bone-pickers. "Then we check hospitals. Police stations. Power plants. Any place that couldn't afford to lose power."
"This sounds like a lot of work," Walt said. "Then again, a lot less work than tramping across the entire Mexican desert."
He checked to make sure his .45 was still buckled to his hip and that his backup pistol was inside the pocketed vest he wore to keep vital supplies close at hand. They hoisted their bags and headed toward the city.
A dog barked in the distance. Pigeons shuffled on the eaves of red tile roofs. From outside, the plan had sounded very simple, but down in the maze of streets, it took on a more Herculean tone. They didn't know where any hospitals were. If they tried going door to door, they might run into survivors. Survivors who would be understandably upset to be busted in on by a couple of gun-toting strangers.
Skeletons lolled in gutters. Unfamiliar, Euro-looking cars rotted along the curb. Why couldn't all cities post a map at the entrance? How had anyone found any strange place before GPS? Before they had cell phones to call for directions the instant they got lost? It was a wonder the entire human race hadn't taken the wrong left one day and wound up dead in a ditch.
A brick-colored church with two spires and a dome huddled in the distance. Hundreds of feet above the city, a red cable car hung dead on the lines. They passed through a neighborhood of posh houses colored white and pink and yellow and robin's egg blue. After another couple blocks, Walt spotted the first sign for a hospital. The word was the same in English and it was strange to see the cognate after so many names and signs in Spanish.
They found it soon after, a white building trimmed in blue. Bones and shriveled scalps were scattered everywhere, black hair stirred by the breeze. The lights were off, which meant nothing. Clear pools of sunlight flooded white floors stained with old brown blood. Walt got out his flashlight.
"Basement, right? They always keep this sort of thing in the basement."
Lorna nodded. "Check the pharmacy while we're here, too. See if they've got any antibiotics."
The sides of the halls were lined with blue tarps wrapping long-decayed bodies. Some were piled two or three deep. During the plague, he'd been in the hospital for an unrelated stabbing. It had been chaos. They'd had no clue. The treatment of the corpses here looked undignified, but he expected everything had gone to hell in the last 24 hours before the place had shut down for good, when thousands of the sick were stretched out in the parking lot and the staff had to clear the dead from the beds while they were still coughing their last.
They took the stairs down. Their feet echoed in the stairwell. Every closing door boomed like the command of an angry god. After much wandering down halls that were much less dirty than the dusty, bloody floors upstairs, they found the generator room. It was mostly intact, but there was a distinct vacancy where the machine had once been.
Walt shined the light over disconnected wires and a dust-print where the generator once sat. "Well shit."
Lorna waved a hand in dismissal. "Not the end of the world. We'll check the records in reception. Learn where the other hospitals are."
"How's your Spanish?"
"Adequate."
"You do that while I check the pharmacy. What's the Spanish for 'antibiotic'? 'Antibiotico'?"
"Yep."
They returned upstairs. Lorna swung around the front counter and started rooting through the racks of paper records in the room behind. Walt wandered to the pharmacy and found it thoroughly looted. Bottles and pills speckled the ground. Many of the shelves had been completely emptied. A lot of what was left was gibberish, Spanish medical terms and corporate Mexican brands that meant less than nothing to him. Lacking anything better to do, and dubious that he'd be in another hospital today, he rifled through them anyway, turning up two bottles of fat pills he suspected were antibiotics. On the back of a dusty shelf, he spotted a bottle of what was definitely hydrocodone.
He glanced at the dark door, sat down, and removed two Ziploc bags from one of his vest pockets. He shook the maybe-antibiotics into one bag and the painkillers into another so they wouldn't rattle when he walked, placing the baggies in a vest pocket. Back at reception, Lorna examined a spread of records, taking down addresses on the back of a piece of paper.
He passed her one of the empty bottles. "That an antibiotic?"
She gave it a glance. "Looks like. Got a whole pile of addresses here. One's old folks care. Right down the street."
She finished transferring addresses and they walked back into the painfully bright sunlight. They got the number off the building next door, confirmed they were headed the right way, went down the block, and crossed the street to a much shabbier and homey building. Lorna held the door for him.
The generator was there in the basement. Giant and white and slotted with vents. Walt prodded it. It didn't even pretend to budge.
"Okay, that thing weighs hundreds of pounds," he said. "Guess we're bringing the battery to it."
"No shit, it's industrial-grade." Lorna leaned in to examine its outlets and to thumb the dust from its display. "The best way to do this without blowing ourselves up or burning down the hospital is to find a jump box. It'll be dead, but we plug it into this thing, then hook up the battery, charge it up, and we're golden."
"Where do we find a jump box?
"
"Automotive supply. They're loot-worthy, but not number one on most people's list. We're going to need methanol, too."
"Methanol?"
"Wood alcohol," she said. "Gasoline goes stale a year or two after it's processed, but methanol should hold up fine."
"Will it hurt the car?"
"Who cares?"
He rubbed his temples. "Where do we get wood alcohol?"
Lorna shrugged. "Auto shops sometimes carry it. If not, hardware stores are a good bet. We'll probably need it for the generator, too."
"I hate errands," Walt said.
"More than you hate being eaten by coyotes?"
"Depends on the errand."
It felt good to have the generator checked off, at least. Before they left the care facility, Walt checked the kitchen and storage, turning up a few silvery packets of freeze-dried potatoes and beans and unopened water jugs. Heavy, but they could toss them in the car.
He hated errands even more after they'd burned two hours wandering cluelessly through Zacatecas' streets and the boxy, pretty little houses and shops. Lorna found a jump box at the first auto shop they stumbled on. It was a heavy black box floppy with cables. No methanol, but there was a big box home improvement store just down the street. Inside, they struck gold. Translucent, liquid gold.
They loaded up a green wheelbarrow with jugs of wood alcohol and rolled back to the care facility, which involved several wrong turns and two arguments, the second quite heated and ending in Lorna marching down the block, pointing her finger, and waiting for Walt to roll his eyes, catch up, and discover that she was in fact pointing right at the building with the generator.
There was a late-model Suburban stalled at the intersection; it had clearly been working until its driver had unfortunately died. Walt opened the door, reached past the sun-mummy in the driver's seat, and tried the ignition for laughs. When that failed, he popped the hood and watched Lorna detach the battery.
She lifted it with a grunt, then set it down and brushed away a leaf, a spider web, and a generous coating of dust. He followed her inside carrying a flashlight and the jump box and lighted the way down the stairs.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 83