"You take to this with disturbing ease," he said.
She lowered her marker. "Where did you learn?"
"Jail."
"You were in jail?"
"Nothing that exciting. Some drug charges. My celly claimed this was San Quentin shiv-fighting. I don't know about that, but it's proven effective enough."
They danced back and forth, shuffling across the grass. He showed her four ways to grab the enemy with her free hand: a noncommittal, thumbless hold; a death grip; a grab for the enemy's fingers; a wristlock. He showed her how to jab at the eyes and rake the face. Some was instinctual, but there was a crispness to his technique that she was greedy to learn. To replicate it, she had to slow down to a frustrating crawl.
The sun sank. They went home and slept, picking up where they left off right after breakfast. Martin watched glumly from the shade of a palm. After a couple hours, she suggested they go take more guns from the bunker to bring back to Jill. Martin brightened. He had some ideas about the rainwater-collection system and how to apply it to the underground homes of the market.
At the bunker, Raina left a few guns and dozens of boxes of ammo behind. She wanted a fallback plan. They loaded the wagon with twenty firearms of all shapes and sizes and a thousand rounds of ammo. It was a tough drag and it took most of the night.
"Nice work," Jill said in the doorway of her home, groggy-eyed; it wasn't yet dawn. "Can you get more?"
The gunshots and smoke rent Long Beach for two more days. Jill had scouts who returned with stories that it was mostly sound and fury. A few people had died on both sides, but they were mostly feeling each other out, dancing the same way Raina danced with Mauser in the grass of their yard, markers held close to their bodies, waiting for an opening, a mistake. Raina took Martin and Mauser into the ruins to plumb more arms. When they came back, with just two pistols, a rifle, and a few boxes of bullets, the scouts said the east had been quiet all day.
Men and women came and went from the Dunemarket. Most wandered among the tents and blankets, but a few found Jill, murmured with her, and followed her up the hill to her home. Raina watched each one, memorizing faces.
Raina continued combing the old homes. On their previous trip to the bunker, Martin had drawn sketches of its water collection and filtration system, and while Raina searched for weaponry, he looted tools and materials from garages and piled them in the wagon.
Raina didn't keep any of the guns, but she took her knives everywhere. As she scavenged, she thought about how she would use them—if a man attacked her like so, she would block and stab like so; if he came in from her left, she envisioned slipped past him, slashing and stabbing at his guts as she tried to get around to his back. When she thought no one was looking, she practiced on the trees, attacking low limbs, visualizing them as aggressive arms waiting to be gripped and cut and broken.
But someone had been watching. A couple days into her makeshift, constant practice, she returned to the Dunemarket with a wagonload of mesh screens and bags of charcoal for Martin's water barrels. He intercepted her on the road and grinned.
"Want to see something cool?" he said.
"No," she said. "I hate cool things."
For a moment, he looked devastated, then laughed and blushed. "Then you're going to really hate this. Come on."
"Let me get the wagon to the market."
Martin glanced dismissively at the pile of material. "That stuff made it through the last five years. I'm pretty sure it can handle five more minutes. Come on!"
She glanced up the road to make sure no one was around to take it, then pulled the wagon to the shoulder and let the handle clank to the ground. Martin jogged down Gaffey St., burnt-out foundations to his right, untouched homes to his left. He hung a left down a narrow side street that led to their home, a pink stucco place with two couches on its shaded porch. He hunched down in front of the one-car garage, heaved, and shoved the door up its track with a rickety clatter.
A wooden post jutted from the middle of the floor. A pair of thick sticks poked from the post at knee- and shoulder-height, padded with foam and wrapped in cloth. Sanded wooden knobs capped the limbs' ends.
"It's all yours," he smiled.
She stepped forward. "You got me a scratching post?"
"But it's not for cats. It's for Rainas." He walked around it, striking at the padded limbs. "It's a practice dummy. So you can train when Mauser isn't around."
"Cool."
"It is cool. You should try it."
She got out her knife and, feeling foolish, jabbed at one of its "arms." The blade sank into the foam. The attack took her uncomfortably close to the other arm. The two angled legs threatened to tangle her own. She pulled out the knife, grabbed its arm with her open right hand like Mauser taught her, and swung to the dummy's side, stabbing at the body of the post. She stepped back, considering the sanded wood.
"When did you have time to build this?"
"Mornings," Martin said. "Afternoons, too. Sometimes at night, so long as I didn't have to make any cuts to the wood. I guess I spent pretty much the last three days on it."
"It's cool. It's like a body. It makes you think about how you'd fight a real person."
"Cool," he grinned. "Let me know when you cut the foam up too bad and I'll replace it."
She nodded and attacked it again, rattling its arm. Mauser had shown her a few steps to use, short, shuffling things he claimed would let her react faster and move in or out without commitment—that was a big thing for him, committing. He said it was one thing to commit to a punch, but when the other guy had a knife, too, you didn't want to make any big clumsy moves where he could stab you right back. She found the steps unnatural and had to think about each one, but the dummy gave her the perfect target to slow down and visualize what each step meant.
When she finally looked up, Martin was gone. When she got tired she toweled off with a bit of the unboiled water they kept in the garage and went inside to eat dinner. She returned to the garage and resumed, practicing without end, a slow dance that left her shoes dusty and the floor littered with bits of foam.
"What's that?" Mauser said. She whirled. He coughed into his hand. He smelled like beer and his eyes were puffy. "Find yourself a scratching post?"
"Martin made it," she said. "So I can practice when I'm by myself."
Mauser chuckled and touched the slashed-up foam of one of its arms. "That kid. He'd take a bullet for you. And then take the bullet and build it into a bullet-spitting robot. We're wasting his potential."
She lowered her knife, sweating in the half-cool night. "What do you mean?"
"That he's handy. We should get him to work on a trebuchet. A mangonel, even. Blast the holy hell out of the enemy's stupid yacht."
"About the other thing. Taking a bullet."
Mauser raised his eyebrows, which barely widened his glassy eyes. "You really don't know?"
"Know what?"
"That he pines for you like the taiga. Yearns like young Werther."
It took her a moment to translate. She shook her head. "He's too young."
Mauser scoffed. "Like them older, do you?"
"Maybe I don't like them at all."
His eyebrows shot up, then his face pinched in on itself. "You're messing with me."
She laughed at him. "Why do you care? Are you jealous?"
Mauser's expression clouded. He stepped closer, as close as she came to the dummy as she stabbed at the vitals between its arms and legs. "How old are you, really?"
"Would it matter?"
He smiled, eyes half closed, breath whistling through his nose. He moved toward her. Her pulse leapt.
He halted and bared his teeth at the dummy. "Does it matter to the law? To this little society we've got here? No. Thirteen, seventeen, eight, eighty, it's all the same."
"You talk a lot," she said.
"And I wasn't finished." He patted her face. "It doesn't matter to the law because there isn't one. But call me old fashioned, it still ma
tters to me." He winked at her and lumbered past. "Good night, Raina."
The garage door slammed. Her candles wavered. She flushed with a lowdown shame. She whirled on the dummy and jammed her knife into its neck.
Mauser wasn't around in the morning. Not in the house. Not in the yard. Not in the Dunemarket, either, when she was offloading flares and binoculars onto a trader's blanket and three Catalinan soldiers strolled up and asked for her by name.
16
Lorna drove with purpose through the buttery sunshine and dried-out streets of outer Los Angeles. Or maybe it was still Orange County, Walt didn't know. All he knew was that the ocean glittering far below wasn't as pretty as Mexico's shores. Not the southwest coast they'd reached after their first leg through the jungle. Certainly not the pale blue glow of the Gulf. It wasn't just a loser in the looks department, either. According to Lorna, it was more dangerous here, too. A downgrade in pretty much every way from the life he'd left behind.
Yet Los Angeles still felt like a homecoming. He hadn't spent more than a few months there, but those months had been big ones. Seeing the city again was like revisiting the city where you went to college. Bumping into your first girlfriend and going out for drinks. Returning at midnight, after retirement, to the field where you hit your first home run.
"This is weird," he said.
She braked the car, jolting him forward. "What? Do you see something?"
"Yeah," he said. "The place where I saved the world."
"How nice." She gassed the car downhill. They drove through nondescript strip malls and apartment complexes, then hit stucco Spanish-style houses and palm-lined streets. She only had to detour around two blockages of wrecked and abandoned cars on her way to the shore. The marina lot was half empty and she pulled into a spot, stopped, idled for a moment, then switched off the car and hopped out into the warm air. Walt stepped onto the grassy parking barrier and stared out to sea.
"We should garage this." She traced her hand over the car's hood, drawing finger-lines in the grime, a thousand miles of Mexican dust and a few hundred of the American kind. "It would be wrong to abandon it."
"Don't you have any on the island?"
"It's more than that. It took us this far. We can't just cast it off."
"You're right. It would sulk for months."
"It could be useful. I don't know how many working cars we have on the mainland."
"That's the thing about our brave new world," Walt said. "The old one isn't really gone. If you spend a little time searching for it, and a lot more time restoring it, you can bring a piece of the old ways back to life."
She turned to him, her desert-tanned face an unguessable mixture of emotions, then nodded at the boats still berthed at the docks. "Here's the big question. Do we row to the island? Or do we sail?"
"Do we have something against engines now?"
"You think it's easier to get a boat running than a car?"
"Rowing or sailing it is," he said. "What's less likely to get us killed?"
"Do you know how to sail?"
Walt laughed. "I bet I make a mighty fine passenger."
Lorna smiled wryly. "Is that a no?"
"That's among the no-ingest noes you've ever heard."
She walked over the grass divider to the concrete walkway to the docks. "I know just enough to know that it would be tough to get us across by myself."
Walt swung his arms, limbering up. "Then we row."
She stepped onto the wooden pier. "It's twenty-plus miles from here."
"We just walked a thousand."
"On our legs. Unless you were doing handstands while I wasn't watching, this will exhaust an entirely different set of muscles. You'll wear out a quarter of the way across."
"The Hawaiians did this all the time. On a diet of poi, no less."
"They had canoes. And crews of rowers. We'll have two of us, unfit for duty, in a rowboat." She stopped in front of a mast angling from the placid marina waters. Kelp swayed in the shallows. Finger-length orange fish drifted between the fronds. "If we row, we know our arms will give out. We don't know that's true of the wind. We'll sail."
"Aye-aye, captain. Does this mean I'm your first mate?"
"Eighth."
"Then I'll settle for being best."
"Third."
He snorted. "Then I'll settle for being the one who's still here."
She walked from boat to boat, sizing up rotted sails and green-tinged ropes, kicking hulls, muttering to herself. Walt grew progressively more bored, feeling unusually useless. After an hour of searching, she clambered onto a small sloop whose sails only had a couple small holes and stomped her foot on the deck.
"This'll do."
"Great," Walt said. "I think I could have swam there by now."
They went back for their goods from the car and loaded up. Lorna unfurled sails, yanked on ropes, rubbed her jaw. "This is going to be ugly. Good chance we'll crash before we're out of the marina."
"Good god. We'll have to swim dozens of feet."
Lorna gestured at the cleats and the ropes holding them to the dock. "Mates work the ropes. Untie us and jump aboard."
He saluted, jumped down to the pier, and unknotted the lines. The boat bobbed at an angle from the dock. He stretched for the ladder and climbed back up. She hauled hard on the sails, trimming them tight against the wind. The sloop swung slowly about. With a grating roar, its rear end hit the dock and knocked Walt to the deck.
"Is that standard?" he said.
The boat ground harder, juddering Lorna's voice. "Get out and swim. We'll see who gets there first."
With a lurch, the rear yanked free. She had chosen a ship near the end of the piers and it wafted toward the jetty of black rocks that pincered the entrance of the marina. The sail flapped against itself and Lorna adjusted it, swinging the boat around to face the way out. It overcorrected, nose pointed toward the rocks, drawing closer by the second.
"Lorna," he said.
"Who drove a thousand miles to get us here?" she shouted into the wind and the slap of waves against the hull.
"You did."
"And I can fucking sail us the last twenty to get home."
He strapped himself in to one of the fishing seats and gripped it hard. The boat bobbed closer and closer to the rocks. When it came parallel, the jetty was so near he could have jumped down and landed on it. The wind bore them past into the open ocean.
Walt stood and cheered. "Now there's the girl I married."
She smiled vaguely and went back to work on the ropes. The sun banked from the waves. The shore receded behind them. He thought he saw a darker blue blur on the horizon but couldn't be sure. He offered to help and she brushed him off. He returned to the fisherman's chair, plunked down, and enjoyed the sun on his skin and the scent of the salt.
The blur coalesced into a blob and then into a solid lump. Walt hadn't been on a proper boat since trips off Long Island with his childhood friends, but he thought they were making good time. The sun climbed and peaked. He napped, waking with sweat greasing the folds of his skin. His mouth was dry. He went into the cabin for a drink of water, then approached Lorna near the mast. She gazed at the approaching island.
"I'm concerned," she said.
"Isn't that it?" he pointed. "The big island-shaped island?"
"About us."
Walt blinked, stung. "The part where we have fun together? Or the part where we went through some amazing shit down in the jungle but came out alive because we had each other?"
"My people won't understand."
"Will they understand my middle finger?"
She smiled tightly. "You won't be able to help us if they don't trust you. This thing I brought you here for is bigger than us."
"You're serious?" he said. "What are you suggesting? That we break it off?"
"Maybe just for a while."
He sniffed at the ocean. "Nope."
"What do you mean, nope?"
"I mean," Walt said, "that I'
m much more concerned about a resurgent alien menace than the judgment of your friends. If they don't like it, I can always head right back to Mexico."
"Walt."
"Lorna."
She rolled her eyes, wind whipping her hair. "This is a different world than the Yucatan. There are rules."
"No there aren't." He stood, spreading his hands, the breeze drying the sweat from his armpits and the crooks of his elbows. "If you think anything's changed, then you don't understand what the plague was all about. It didn't change the rules. It just proved they never existed."
"Great speech," she said. "That won't change how they feel. They're good people, but they're very wary of outsiders. That's what kept us alive."
He stripped off his shirt and slung it on the deck. "Okay."
"What are you doing?"
He stepped to the railing. "Swimming back to shore."
"Walt."
"Lorna."
"You don't understand what it's like there."
"Do you care about me?" he said.
"Of course I do."
"Then act like it. It's that simple."
"No it isn't!" She grabbed his arm, fingers prying into his biceps. Her eyes burned brighter than the sun on the sea. "But what I care about most is saving my people. I don't want to give them any reason to distrust you."
"It wouldn't matter," he said.
"That's right. I forgot. You're the man who saved the world. How's a little thing like a society going to stand in your way?"
"Here's the thing: I don't give a shit about these people. I give a shit about you."
"Were you always this romantic?"
"It's the reason any of us are alive."
She shook her head, black hair streaming across her face, and glared at the island. "It would have to be a secret."
"Us?"
"We don't have to stop. But we do have to pretend like it never was."
He shook his head. "I don't know what you're so afraid of. But this isn't my home. If that's what it takes, then I'll keep my mouth closed."
"Good."
"Until it's on your body."
She gave him a look. "You ran off by your lonesome. You don't know how things changed. When the plague took our families, we formed new ones. Hundreds of people on that island see me as their sister. Their niece. Their daughter. Six of our men died and I'm coming back holding hands with a stranger. How's that going to look to them? Do you think people judge women less now that everything's gone to shit?"
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 87