"You'd think the total collapse of everything we knew would be a pretty good time to reevaluate old prejudices." He leaned forward and set his elbows on his knees. "Know what, I have no problem lying. If that's what it takes, for all I care we can tell them I'm a eunuch."
"Speaking of." She adjusted the ropes and turned to him. "Take off your pants. It could be a while."
He grinned and unlatched his belt. The pitch of the ship made things tricky even after they were lying down, threatening to slam him onto her with far more force than his anatomy could stand, but that just made it better. He barely held off long enough for her to finish. After, he lay on top of her, taking great gasps of salty air, sweat trickling down his sun-baked body. She winked and pushed him off and got a towel from the cabin.
The island congealed from a blue-black lump into a green chunk of land. Lorna adjusted the flapping sails. He dressed and wandered back onto the deck.
"Is the wind always like this?"
She shrugged, clothed again. "Sometimes it blows the other way instead."
He retreated inside the cabin with scissors, knife, rag, water, and his remaining can of Gillette. By the time the island was close enough to make out its ridges, trees, homes, and docks, he'd carpeted the floor with his long hair and middling beard. His chin was reasonably smooth, his hair cut short enough to bristle his palm. He had shaved himself down to the scalp a few times in the jungle—sometimes he got so sick of the heat and humidity he couldn't handle a single hair on his head—and as always, the act was cathartic, redefining. Lorna gave him a long eye as he stepped back on the deck.
"Who's that?" she said. "A stowaway?"
"Have to look tough for the locals. Long hair is for poets."
The island loomed nearer. A quarter mile out, a mirror winked from the shore. Walt shielded his eyes and leaned forward. A rifle boomed across the ocean.
"Jesus!"
"Get down and try not to get shot," Lorna said.
Walt had already crouched down. He dropped to the pitching deck, shielding his eyes against the blinding waves. "I thought these were your friends. What did you do, skip out on the rent?"
"Give me your shirt."
He peeled it off and flung it at her, not bothering to ask any questions. This was her show now. She pounded up the metal ladder on the side of the cabin, braced herself against the rise and fall of the waves, and twirled his shirt above her head.
"What's that, your distress signal?" Walt said. "Or just trying to convince them we're friendly strippers?"
"They don't know it's me," she said. "They were expecting Hannigan's boat. Weeks ago."
Walt rolled on his belly. The island neared, a mass of craggy green hills fronted by rocky beaches. The remnants of a small town waited to the right of their present course. Fingers of smoke climbed from chimneys. The mirror on the shore winked again. Lorna whipped the shirt to her sides—three times right, twice left, once right. The mirror flashed twice and disappeared. A figure waited on the sandy shore.
Lorna drove the boat straight into the beach. Sand scraped the hull, groaning and squeaking under the mass and momentum. Walt sprawled forward, landing on his elbows, pain stinging up his arms.
"Lorna?" a man called.
She grinned, strode to the railing, and vaulted over the side, landing in the surf with a splash. Walt followed her over. It was a warm day but the water was cold. He gasped, sucking in a mouthful of salty water. He coughed and kicked, beginning to panic, but his shoes struck sand beneath him. He lurched up and walked to shore.
Lorna embraced a youngish man with a wormlike, angry scar running front to back down his scalp. He pulled away, laughing in the sunlight.
"We thought you were dead!"
She smiled wryly. "Just about."
The man's smile cracked. He glanced at Walt and the boat beached in the surf, then rubbed his mouth. "Is this it?"
"We were attacked. Aliens."
"Hannigan?"
She shook her head. The man embraced her again. After a couple seconds, she drew back and nodded at Walt. "But we got what we came for."
The man with the scarred scalp smiled and frowned at the same time. "That's him?"
"Tell Karslaw we're here. We're going to my house to clean up. We'll call on him in an hour."
The man nodded, smiled sympathetically, and jogged toward the town down the beach.
"Karslaw," Walt said. "Sounds like a Russian horselord."
Lorna hiked up the beach toward a road. "He was a contractor. Now he's our king."
"Should I wear a tie?"
"Subtract the sweat and the dirt and we'll be fine."
She led him up a grassy hill to a Cape Cod-style home painted bold blue and trimmed with white. L.A.'s houses always threw him. This one could have been right at home on Long Island or New England. As usual, the neighboring houses were a jumble of Spanish, Victorian, Tuscan, and '50s modern, though the island town was decidedly more beach town/tourist than what he'd seen on the mainland. He still couldn't decide whether this schizophrenic diversity was an awesome display of artistic freedom or a pathetic attempt to appropriate the status of older places.
Lorna's front door was unlocked. She strode through it, glancing casually at a kitchen and living room, as if to reassure herself it was still there. She brought him to the back patio, which was dusty and crusted with old leaves. She told him to wait there and brought a plastic kiddie pool, a bar of soap, a towel, and sloshing jugs of clear water. He washed up. She came back with some beat-up but clean men's clothes—jeans, t-shirt, white socks.
He stood up, dripping. "Want to join me?"
"Dry off and get ready. I've been gone for months."
"So what's five minutes more?"
"Walt."
"Two minutes."
"The boat wasn't enough?" she said. "Get dressed. Let's go. Or I'll bring him here instead."
Walt stepped out of the kiddie pool and grabbed his towel. He got on his clothes, his shoes. Once he was ready, Lorna climbed an unpaved trail into the hills. A herringbone marina extended from the bay. Pastel Mediterranean houses crowded the slopes above the beach. Lorna dipped off the ridge into a valley, putting the town a mile behind them. At a lonely hill across the plateau, a vast structure spread against the horizon.
Walt pointed. "What is that?"
"Karslaw's home," Lorna said.
"It looks like a..."
"Fort?"
"I was going to say castle."
"It should. It is one."
"Okay," he said. "What is a castle doing on an island twenty miles from L.A.?"
"Exactly what it's supposed to do," she said. "Protecting us."
"From aliens?"
"Mainlanders. We started building it before we knew the aliens weren't all dead."
High wooden walls thrust from an earthen rampart. Wooden towers flanked the gates and the corners of the outer walls, rising another three floors into the sky. A keep waited behind the outer fortifications. From across the valley, it looked wooden, too, but as they crossed the plowed-up farmland surrounding the dirt road, he saw the keep was brick and stone.
"I feel like I could use some etiquette lessons," Walt said. He glanced back at the shacks spotting the fields on the approach to the castle. "Do I call him 'Sir'? 'Your Majesty'?"
"Karslaw."
The wooden gates were open. A figure moved in one of the towers. Walt wasn't sure what to expect as a way of greeting—trumpets, men with pikes, a hail of arrows—but nothing met or challenged them as they thumped across an actual drawbridge spanning a dry moat. A flagstone path led to the keep.
A tall, burly man exited into the grassy bailey. He was bald and bearded and his shoulders rolled easily as he walked. Lorna laughed. The man ran the last few feet, crushing her to his chest.
"We thought you were dead!" he bellowed.
"Almost." She grinned the same wry grin as at the beach, tugging her shirt smooth.
"So Chad said. I'm sorry to hear—
"
"Later," Lorna said. "I'll tell you everything later. Once I've had gin. I miss gin like it were air."
"Whatever the returning hero wants." Karslaw stepped back from her and regarded Walt. "Who's this?"
"Walt," Lorna said.
The big man jerked his thumb toward Santa Monica Bay. "Is he the one—?"
"Yep. That's him."
"Huh. A man never looks like his reputation, does he?" Karslaw extended his thick hand to Walt. Across the blue waters, Los Angeles rested in the haze. "Welcome to Catalina. Care to finish what you started?"
17
She wanted to run. Hide. No one knew the ruins like her. The three soldiers down the street could hunt her for years and never find her. But she didn't feel like running anymore. Not from the Catalinans. She might still fear them, but she hated them more.
The soldiers were at a stall speaking to the woman whose two boys used bikes to deliver messages and packages across the city. Raina walked out from the shadow of the shack she'd been watching from.
"I'm Raina," she said. Heads swung her way.
"Is that her?" a dark-haired man asked another whose windbreaker sagged over his basketball-sized paunch.
"Yup." The paunchy man smiled at her. "You don't forget eyes like that. They look ready to leap right out of her skull and stab you."
"Why aren't you at your house?" said the dark-haired man.
"What house?" Raina said.
He waved his hand west toward her old home. "Down on the shore."
"I moved."
"Why didn't you let anyone know?"
"No one told me I had to let anyone know."
"Made it damn hard to find you."
"I had to move," she said. "I can't run my boat by myself. Was I supposed to starve?"
The paunchy man glanced at the people milling around the blankets and merchants, several of whom watched their conversation. "Maybe we should take this somewhere more private."
"I'm fine here," Raina said.
"We're getting off track," said the dark-haired man. "Where were you last Friday?"
"When was Friday?"
The other man rolled his eyes. "Were you at Pokers?"
"What's Pokers?" she said.
"Whorehouse." He gestured east. "In Long Beach."
"Why would I be at a whorehouse in Long Beach?"
The dark-haired man laughed. "Do you have an answer for anything?"
"I wasn't at a whorehouse in Long Beach. I'm just a girl. Who would ask such a disgusting question?"
He pulled back his head, flustered. The man with the belly smiled, mirth in his eyes and contempt on his mouth. "Because one of the pros said she saw a skinny little Mexican girl hanging around in the parking lot that night."
"I'm not Mexican," Raina said. "My parents were from Costa Rica."
The first man ran his hand through his black hair. "Hold on, did Heather mean Mexican-Mexican, or of the general appearance of a Mexican?"
The other man shrugged. "Hell should I know?"
"What's this about?" Raina said.
The third soldier hadn't spoken the whole time. He had doleful eyes and the build of a utility pole. He leaned down to her level. "Murder."
"Someone died?"
The man straightened, judging her from on high. The fat man wiped his nose on his sleeve. "They didn't drop dead. They were killed. Know anything about it?"
She shook her head. "I was moving here last week. Hauling stuff with my friend Martin. Why would I know anything about a murder?"
"People kill for many reasons," said the tall and quiet man. "Greed. Pleasure. Revenge."
Raina let out a shaky breath. "Well, I don't know anything. Am I under arrest?"
The three soldiers looked between each other. The paunchy man reached out and tapped her chin. "Not yet. But don't go anywhere. We might want to talk to you again."
She wanted to bite off his fingers. "I'll stay right here."
The Catalinans walked up the road, stopping to talk with another vendor, who pointed up the hill toward San Pedro. Raina watched them until they climbed over the rise, then ran to her new house to tell Martin about her alibi.
"Do you think they'll come for me?" he said.
"Don't look so scared. You just have to lie."
"What if they can tell?"
She snorted. "If they knew anything, they wouldn't be asking."
"What if they're trying to trick you? To get you to lie? We'd better tell Mauser."
"Why?"
Martin gaped at her. "Because he could be in trouble, too."
"He can take care of himself," she said. "But you're right. We have to get our stories straight."
They asked around the market and Dana the ironmonger said Mauser was speaking to Jill at her house. They caught him closing the door to the hillside home and, isolated in the dusty, palm-studded field, Raina explained how the three soldiers had come to her about the murders.
After, Mauser grimaced and dabbed sweat from his brow. "They said this woman saw you at Pokers?"
"Yes," Raina said. "Is that really its name?"
"Tragically, yes," Mauser said. "And Heather who works there said she saw a skinny Latino girl on the scene."
"Yes."
"Which describes, oh, ten percent of the surviving populace of Los Angeles County."
"But what if she can identify Raina?" Martin said.
"Should we kill her?" Raina said.
"Should we kill—?" Mauser tipped back his head and spread his arms, beseeching the sky. "Raina. Killing can't solve all your problems. Well, unless you kill everyone, anyway, at which point you probably would be rid of all your worries. Except what to do about the smell."
"But they came straight for me."
"No, they didn't. It's been what, a week since they found the bodies? Since the war began? If they had any real leads, they'd have been here six days ago." He cracked his knuckles. "This is a new golden age for violent criminals. The police don't have any DNA to trip you up with. Of course, there aren't any proper cops either, so those fellows who came to see you could, if so inclined, beat the shit out of you until the truth spilled out with it." He picked at something on his neck, looking thoughtful. "So don't piss them off, I suppose. Did you piss them off?"
Raina shrugged. "I played dumb."
"They were looking for you to slip up. Or for an excuse to smash your skull. If they come back, stick to your story and it will all be cool."
"But they knew my name."
"Yeah, because they came to the market with your description and someone said, 'Oh sure, that's Raina.' Trust me, they don't have shit. Know how I know that? Because you're talking with me instead of drowning in the bilge of their boat."
Raina wandered off, convinced, but in the morning, the hand-cranked siren yowled from the Dunemarket. She jogged from the garage where she'd been practicing on the dummy. Down the hill, twenty of the Catalinans marched into the market. Some carried axes and machetes. All carried guns. She threw herself behind a rusted pickup and waited for them to call her name.
But they weren't there for her. Their leader strode to the middle of the street and cupped his hands to his mouth. Wars were costly, he declared. In order to fund the ongoing battle against the violent gangs to the east, they required—to their own regret—increased tributes. More food. Bullets, if such things could be found, although they would accept raw lead as well. They needed soap, too, which they knew the merchants knew how to make, or at least import. Condoms. Toothpaste. A host of minor things. Raina didn't listen too close. All their soldiers would soon be dead.
There was a lot of grumbling among the merchants. Less so among the travelers who'd been bartering at their stalls. After the soldiers left, Jill announced a meeting for the following afternoon. She wrote a batch of messages and handed them to the bicycle boys.
Sixty-odd people showed up for the meet, sitting under umbrellas and a tarp stretched between two stalls to shield them from the sun. It wasn't the
entire population of the Dunemarket; Raina figured there had to be at least a couple hundred more in the hills of the park and the surrounding ruins. Raina had brought Jill enough guns to arm half the people in the street. Assuming they were willing to fight. Seeing how few they were, Raina understood why Jill waited.
But the war with the Catalinans didn't have to be a fight to the death like the dogs she'd stalked on the pier. There were hummingbirds, too. They fought off much larger birds with no more than a sharp bill and raw anger. However small their numbers, if they struck back with enough force, it might be enough to convince the Catalinans to stick to their island.
"So the islanders want more," Jill said from a small platform set up in front of the tarp. Her voice was hoarser than normal. "I don't see much choice. We have to give them what they want."
"How much further do we bend?" called Velasquez, who ran the herb stand. "What if the next thing they want is my left nut?"
"Then be grateful you've got a right one." Some laughter, but Jill didn't have to wait long before it ended. "All they want is a little food. A little stuff. A little of our time. And you know what? All that time is borrowed. They won't be here forever."
"How do you know that?" Velasquez said.
Jill surveyed the crowd. Her face was composed, but Raina could see the calculation. The rebellion wasn't an open thing. Was every face in the crowd of sixty a face Jill could trust? Raina didn't think Jill would think so. She leaned forward.
"Over the last few months, we've been assembling a trade union," Jill said. "We're still working on logistics. A way to ensure that when we speak, they listen. In another couple months, we'll be ready to offer them a proposal. Their island keeps them safe, but it also keeps them poor. If they want what we've got, they'll have to negotiate."
"From the right end of a gun," an old man grumbled.
"We'll see. I think they'll listen. Keep your heads down and we'll see how it shakes out."
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 88