The street was silent. Walt scanned the office for any more shooters. A door banged in the hallway behind him. Lorna jogged into the room, struggling to keep her expression composed.
"Now that's fucking teamwork," Walt said.
She pointed at the blunt black gun in his hand. "Did you have that at the beach?"
"Never leave home without it."
"You had a laser. And you didn't use it."
He pulled back his head. "Hang on. I had a laser. They had lots. Not to mention whatever crazy alien submarine they must have sailed up in. Under those circumstances, I couldn't have turned a Big Wheel, let alone the tide."
Lorna shook her head, composure cracking into cold fury. "You could have tried!"
He fumed. "Can you walk and chew bubblegum? Pat your head and rub your belly?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Can you?"
She spread her palms. "Sure."
"Great, you can do two things at once. So yell at me while we drive."
He tucked the gun inside his vest and headed down the stairs. After the darkness of the stairwell, the lobby's deflected sunlight felt positively lush. At the front doors, he stopped to stare at the dumbstruck windows across the street. No one fired. Nothing moved.
He jogged toward the Suburban. Lorna followed with the jump box and the battery, which she fitted into the engine while he watched the street. She dropped the hood with a metal clunk and got behind the wheel. Walt loaded up the back. The engine turned over, coughed, revved, and steadied. Walt pumped his fist and leapt into the passenger seat. She lurched forward before he could close the door.
"North," he pointed. She said nothing. He rolled down the window to better watch the street.
The drive was hell. Every few blocks, wrecks clogged the next intersection. At times, Lorna was able to climb the car over the curb and maneuver around the smashed cars. Others, she had to back up and try another route through the unfamiliar streets. Once, after two unsuccessful detours, she clenched her teeth and forced her way forward, bulldozing through a yellow Beetle with a squeal of scraping metal.
"Was driving always this much fun?" Walt said.
She cursed at another blockage, three low sedans crunched bumper-to-bumper by a burnt-out ambulance. "This is moronic. We should have scouted our path. Or taken a car at the edge of the city. We're sitting ducks."
"We feel more like Godzilla on wheels to me. You're doing great. We'll be fine."
She backed up, swung around, and headed away from the wreckage. "You don't know that."
"Yeah, you're right. But no matter how much time you spend worrying about it, there are only two outcomes. Either you'll be fine, or you won't."
"Dr. Phil? When did you get in the car?"
"Lorna, I'm not bullshitting you with mind-magic. If you'd been through what I've been through, you'd know it doesn't matter."
"What makes you think I've been through anything less?" She fiddled with knobs until the headlights came on, bathing the dusty streets in yellow. "Like you don't get worried? You're pissed off all the time."
"Because terrible shit keeps happening," he laughed. Light glinted from the upper floor of an office, drawing his eye, but it was just the last of the setting sun. "But it doesn't get under my skin. Those problems aren't chiggers, they're flies. They land, irritate me for a minute, and then I wave them away."
"That must be wonderful." Lorna hauled the wheel right, diving around a tipped and half-flattened bus. "What heights of self-improvement. And all it took was going Rambo on an alien species."
A veritable horsefly of irritation landed on Walt's neck and bit down hard. "If you don't like what's happening, do something different. Park the car. We'll track our way out on foot, then come back and drive out."
"Right. We'll grab our compasses and draw a little map. This is all so much smarter than planning ahead. I totally get why Karslaw sent me 2500 miles to find you."
"Just drive. Let me concentrate on not getting shot by paranoid locals."
He turned to the window. The truth was that he was stung. She wasn't a fly, she was a hornet. He wasn't sure he liked that. Was he coming all this way, risking his life just so he could be in the presence of a woman who often acted like she couldn't stand him? Because that would be kind of crazy. Not fun-crazy, either. The kind of crazy that manifests after sitting on a pyramid for too long with your hand down your pants.
He glanced across the cab at her. She kept her eyes on the way ahead, cornering down a long hill of square and tidy houses. From above, the neat rows of homes must have looked like Easter-colored teeth.
Like that, the city stopped. The Suburban coasted down the black stripe of the road. To each shoulder, yellow weeds poked from the hardpan. The silhouettes of cactus and desert shrubs lurked in the highland night. It smelled like sweet pollen and dry air. It had been a long, long time since he'd traveled any faster than running speed, and as Lorna accelerated down the highway, he rolled down his window, stuck his face out into the night air, and smiled.
Lorna drove for a couple of hours. Without discussion, she pulled off at a ranger station on the edge of a national park. Dim rocks climbed the horizons. Lorna parked behind the station and opened the back of the SUV. While she unloaded gear, Walt entered the cabin, feet clunking on the wood floor, and checked with a flashlight for any obvious families of rattlesnakes, skunks, or tentacled horrors.
He turned up nothing but dust. He lit a candle and dug the Tupperware of waltcakes out of their bag. The mashed avocados had begun to brown but tasted edible enough. He went outside and passed one to Lorna, who accepted it with a nod and chewed slowly, dribbling crumbs.
"Sorry," she said. "I was stressed."
"Yeah, where did that come from?" he said. "We were only trying to flee a strange city after a running gun battle."
"You were trying to help."
"And by this point in life I should have learned that in times of stress, that only makes people angry."
She laughed, touching his arm. "Think the aliens are any better? Or did the pilot only decide to smash Earth after her husband nagged her the whole trip?"
Walt shrugged. "During my encounters, they looked less like enlightened beings and more like the Ten Thousand Stooges. But they must have emotions. They're made of meat just like we are. Chitin and slooshy stuff, anyway."
"It will be better when we're home." She tipped back her head to the burning bed of stars. "I don't know this place. Its people. You and I are all there is. Spend too much time alone and you become a savage."
Walt laughed. "Are you calling me a savage?"
"Aren't you?"
"Who isn't? Aren't we all pretty much shitting in buckets these days?"
"But you tried to massacre an entire species. That puts you into a special, Attila the Hun category of savage."
"Yeah, well they started it." He slipped his arms around her waist. "We're good?"
"We're fine."
That was comforting, but after all the walking, hauling, running, and shooting at Zacatecas, he was too tired to make use of that fineness. They slept in each other's arms. The cold woke him in the middle of the night; they'd gone to bed under a light blanket, but the desert air had cooled drastically, seeping through the cracks in the unheated cabin. It was the first time he'd been cold in a couple years. It felt good, bracing and exposing. Lorna slept on, untroubled.
She looked as pretty by starlight as daylight. Despite all his free time, he hadn't yet taken a close look at his feelings toward her. Now wasn't a good time, either. Not since they'd gotten the car. With any luck, they could finish their journey in three or four days. That wouldn't be nearly long enough to plumb the depths of whatever was inside him.
That was the other advantage to walking. It gave you time to think. To explore things down to the roots. If a voyage was a transition from one place to another, it made sense for it to take place over a transition in time, too. Cars, planes, they obliterated that transition, ma
king a separation in space less real. Less meaningful. It removed the chance for growth. No wonder everyone had been so damn confused and angry before.
He went back to bed. The morning warmed up fast. They packed up and drove out between dusty fields studded with lumpy cacti. The Suburban burned through their fuel fast; they camped outside the next major city they encountered and spent the next day foraging for wood alcohol and moving the car battery to a hybrid.
By the end of the day after that, they were in spitting distance of the border. The landscape stayed hot and dry and vast. Less than 24 hours later, the air turned gentler. Cooler. Damper. The meaning of this still hadn't dawned on Walt by the time they broke over a ridge and looked down on the peopleless sprawl of Los Angeles Basin.
II:
SCOUR
15
Smoke toiled in thick pillars from the shores of Long Beach, stretched over the downtown in gauzy sheets by the constant offshore breeze. The wind blew parallel to their position on the hill above the Dunemarket, but the rifle shots were loud enough to survive the trip, hard cracks followed by echoes that faded out like the slowing of a dried-out, dying machine. Sometimes there was just one shot. At other times, they crackled like strung fireworks, one after the other, overlapping into a fray of bangs. An orange flame climbed from the wick of a pierside building.
"Dumb as hell," Jill said, camo binoculars clamped to her eyes. "What do they do when those flames spread into the city? Call 911?"
"They had the wisdom to survive a plague," Mauser said. "Providing them with many unburnt yet unoccupied sections of city to relocate to."
"The wind's about to stop," Martin pointed. "It always does this time of day."
Raina thought she could taste the smoke. "The Catalinans started the fire. They don't care what it burns."
Jill wiped her sleeve over her mouth. "And you three are to blame for this mess."
"Well, who says who's to blame, really?" Mauser answered. "We wouldn't have gotten involved at all if the Catalinans weren't squeezing our balls off with taxes while the Osseys rob everyone coming to bring us new goods."
"But you're the ones who set them at each other's throats."
"Again, though, is that our fault? If they weren't so touchy, we never would have been able to light this little fire. Surely they must share the responsibility."
"Did you have a reason for starting this war? Or was it just for the fun of setting things on fire?"
Mauser gaped, affronted. "Do you think we're here to brag? Of course we had a reason."
Jill nodded, wiped dust from the lenses of her binoculars, and set them away in the case on her hip. "Guess we'd better go inside."
She trudged down the hill to the shack opening to her underground home. After the dazzling daylight, the cave was total black, and Raina stood in the entrance waiting for her eyes to adapt. Jill hung a right down the hall. Boards creaked; sunlight flooded into a round room walled and floored with mortared brick. Indirect sunlight lit the room through a square window in the roof, making for a kind of courtyard. Possibly the only natural light the underground home allowed. A sturdy table painted Chinese red sat in its center. Jill sat at its head, grabbed a small black box from it, and fished out a brown cigarette. She lit it and blew a pillar of blue-gray smoke at the hole in the ceiling.
"Well?"
Mauser leaned his elbows onto the table and pressed his palms together. "Well."
"We killed three Catalinans in a whorehouse," Raina said. "We carted the bodies away and made it look like the Osseys did it."
Jill let smoke drift from her nostrils. "To set them up. To spark a war."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because we hate them both?" Mauser said.
The woman tapped ash onto the brick floor. "'We.'"
"You wouldn't let us help you," Raina said. "So we had to do it ourselves."
Jill nodded, tapping her nails on the painted wooden table. "How do I know you three caused this?"
Raina delved into her pocket. She withdrew three pale, yellowing scraps that had already gone hard and scratchy along the edges. She spread the three pieces of skin on the table so Jill could see the tattoos.
"These belonged to the Catalinans."
Silence enveloped the room. Martin glanced at Raina, as if seeking permission to speak. "It's compelling proof, isn't it?"
"That you're reckless?" Jill said. "That you don't listen to orders?"
"That we're more than delivery boys," Raina said.
"Right. You're also liabilities."
"You're messing with us," Mauser said, tone halfway between a declaration and a guess. "Back in the good old days, these two couldn't legally drive a car. Don't tell me you're not impressed with the Game of Thrones shit they just pulled."
"If there's no blowback? Sure. You've got my ear." Smoke curled from her mouth. She squinted against it. "Tell me. I know why these two are involved. What's your angle?"
"Moi? Maybe I'm just a keen evaluator of talent. A manager, if you will. Or maybe I believe that in these trying times, a man of action, cunning, and results is well-positioned to be rewarded for his talents."
"Talent. It's true. We need that." She leaned back in her chair and drew on the cigarette, cherry blooming in the gloom. "So let me bring you up to speed. Best estimate, we've got a thousand people living in the greater area. A good piece of everything they're taking out of the ground or the sea is going to the islanders. A lot of the locals were already struggling. Under the tribute, they're scraping."
"Isn't that why there's a rebellion in the first place?" Mauser said.
"But that thousand people is just a guess. There are a lot of ghosts out there. People who want to live their lives and don't want any part of a fight. Of the people who might help us, the Catalinans' tributes mean they have to spend much more of their time farming and fishing than learning how to fight. Meanwhile, the enemy can strike us at any time and retreat to their island at the first setback. They only have to commit their soldiers. If we fight, we risk entire families."
She sat back and pursed her lips. "What this adds up to is slow growth. We stock up—food, medicine, weapons. We keep recruiting and we train our people to be effective fighters. We're not going to turn this into a guerrilla war. Not when so many are fighting just to put food on the table. We wait until we have the strength to end this with a single blow."
"That sounds...dynastic," Mauser said.
Jill tapped her cigarette with her index finger, dumping ash. "It could take months. If things break wrong, it could take years. But I'll tell you this. The less time our people have to spend working and foraging, the more time they have to train. The sooner we drive the Catalinans back to their island for good."
"You still want us to be delivery boys," Raina said. "After all we've done."
"Wrong. I want you to be hunters." The woman smiled. "Of gear. Of guns. And, when the opportunity presents itself, of the enemy."
The conversation continued, but Jill just rehashed what she'd just said. It stung. Raina had imagined she'd become a warrior. One of Jill's frontline fighters. But it didn't sound like there would be a frontline for a long time.
At least Jill no longer regarded her as a shovel, something you used to turn things up. Instead, Jill wanted her to be a knife. You could dig with a knife if you had to. Knives were versatile. But the main use of a knife was to cut. To harm. To kill.
And Raina could live with being a knife.
She moved with Martin and Mauser into a house south of the Dunemarket. The gunshots in Long Beach continued through the night. By morning, the smoke had cleared. After breakfast, figuring that while she worked to advance the rebellion one wagonload at a time, she might as well work to advance herself, too, Raina asked Mauser to teach her to fight.
He raised a brow. "What makes you think I know how to do that?"
"The way you stabbed the man in the bar."
"Then the first lesson is to always keep a psychopathic
teenager around to distract your enemy."
"This isn't a joke. This is my life."
He sighed and gazed across the hills toward Long Beach. "You want to learn? We need some gear. White t-shirts. A bunch of them. And two red markers. Felt. Fat-tipped."
"What for?"
"The markers are your knife. The shirts will show you how easy it is to die."
She drew back her head, then jogged off to the ruins. It was a very simple thing to find the shirts and simpler yet to find the markers. Safe in their bubble packages, they retained their ink. Mauser took her to a park down the hill to the west of the market. Skeletons crowded a concrete culvert but there was no smell.
"Pretend you're about to stab me." He handed her one of the markers. "Not that you need to pretend."
She dropped into her stance and tensed to lunge. He closed his eyes and waved his hands. "Come on, Raina. You're left-handed, aren't you?"
"It's in my left."
"You're leading wrong. You've got your knife out front. You stab at me, maybe I grab your wrist. Bend it into an unwristlike configuration. Take your knife away and stab you with it." He mimicked her knife-first stance, then reversed it, drawing his marker close to his body. He waved his empty hand in her face. "See this? It's my hand. You better not ignore it, because it can punch you in the throat. Poke out your eyes. So I strike with it first."
He did so. Reflexively, she grabbed for it, neutralizing it. He flashed in with the marker, slashing a broad red smear across her gut. "See? That red splotch represents you, quite dead. Because I lead with my free hand."
She reversed her footing. It felt strange, reserving her blade, extending her naked hand first, but after a few minutes of dancing around in the grass, slashing and stabbing, marking each other's arms and guts with red, it felt much safer. More dangerous. Mauser couldn't afford to ignore either threat. If she landed her empty hand, he would be hurt or knocked back, vulnerable to the knife; if he tangled up her free hand with his, that left him open to a swift stab to his belly or ribs.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 86