The Breakers Series: Books 1-3

by Edward W. Robertson

  "That you should shut up and watch the road," she said.

  "Oh really?" He gestured to the barren streets. "Think we'll angry up the ghosts?"

  She did, in fact, but knew better than to say as much. The old people didn't believe in those things, but the old people had grown up apart from death. She had grown up within it. She was sensitive to it in a way these people never had been. Maybe their senses had been drowned out by being surrounded by living cities rather than the waste-jungle they were currently crossing, but she could feel the places where the dead had dropped their bones. That's why the ship in the bay was no good. Maybe that was why there was so much fighting back on the peninsula. The spirits were angry. You couldn't see them, but you could feel them, and they made you angry too. Maybe it would be best to move to a place where no one else had ever lived.

  She just shook her head. "Time spent talking is time not watching."

  "That's a weird thing to say," Mauser muttered. "That's one of yours, isn't it? A little Raina-ism."

  They reached a stretch of burned-down houses and charred apartments. Raina detoured around it. Too little cover there. Too many spirits. Sun slammed down on parking lots and dusty cars and neighborhoods with scrawny yellow lawns hardly wide enough to separate one house from the next.

  Mauser pointed to a green sign at an intersection. "405's a few blocks from here. If I'm remembering my cultural institutions, that should take us all the way to the Getty."

  "It's a raised highway." Raina jerked her head at the lanes strung over the road to the east. "You'll be able to see us from a mile away."

  "Only for another couple miles. Then it's ground-level. Barrier walls on both sides. If we walk along those, we'll be as stealthy as ninjas."

  "What's ninjas?"

  "Are you kidding me? You are one." He looked both ways, then jogged across the intersection. "Here, we'll compromise. Once the highway drops, we'll merge and ride it all the way to the Getty."

  That sounded fair enough. She was about to exit the lands she knew well anyway. The wide boulevard led them past a stately white mall and hotel towers pinstriped with windows. She doubted many people still lived here. There was too much pavement to have space to grow things and all the canned food would have been eaten or spoiled long ago.

  If there were any survivors making a go of it here, they didn't trouble the three travelers. Raina continued north until the angled highway crossed overhead, then followed along in its shadow. When it descended and became one with the ground, they hiked up its curling onramp.

  Dead cars clogged the northbound lanes, but the shoulders were largely clear. They walked along the corrugated barriers. Bugs twirped in the grass. The highway unspooled for miles, curving and rising and falling with the contours of the land.

  "Airport used to be right over there," Mauser pointed after another hour. "The runways are just on the other side of the highway and planes would come in not three hundred feet from the ground. It's no wonder Hollywood turned out the way it did. Passing under that was like driving through a Michael Bay movie."

  "Does anyone ever understand what you're saying?" Raina said.

  "Those raised in America and currently between 25 and forty years of age," Mauser said. "Anyone else, and communication is admittedly spotty."

  The road ran on and on. They stopped for dinner and Raina did some light scavenging of the nearby cars. Most were locked and abandoned; the few that opened tended to have bodies, sun-dried skin wrapped around untouched bones. She found nothing of interest.

  At dark, they slept in the grass beside the concrete walls. She woke to quiet shuffling noises down the road. Mauser was already sitting up, a knife gleaming in his hand, but it was only an animal. Raina didn't fear animals. She had many of them within her and they would tell the live ones that she only killed for food or to sate the demands of the moon.

  "Don't worry," she whispered. "Just possums."

  He snorted. "Is that right? How polite of them to inform you they'd be passing through."

  He continued his vigil, staring into the darkness. A moment later, a fat shadow waddled from the shoulder, the size of a small dog. Mauser's foot jerked, scuffing. The thing turned to face them, its white face standing out in the moonlight.

  "Told you."

  "How the hell did you know that?"

  "Skunks walk faster. Trot-trot-trot, they make. Raccoons coo and fiddle with things. Possums just trudge along. Want to eat it?"

  Mauser laughed and shook his head. Martin got up to go to the bathroom. With everyone awake, they rolled up their beds and walked along the lanes, going slow to avoid tripping in the darkness. This was perhaps Raina's favorite feeling, traveling when she couldn't be seen and no one expected her to be awake. It made her feel wise. Mauser and Martin made too much noise—Martin had forgot to put a cloth between his bowl and his pan and they made a low metal scrape with each step—but even if there were strangers ahead on the highway, the others would be sleeping, confused and alarmed even if the shuffles and coughs were enough to wake them. The deepest night before the dawn was her world, and for a few hours every day, she belonged.

  The night became pre-morning. It was no lighter but she could tell it from the way the birds woke and cheeped. She could feel it in the air, too. The night had cooled but never truly gone cold. It was going to be a hot day.

  Dawn broke. A tattered woman smiled from the billboard of a Spanish TV headquarters. She was used to buildings being two or three stories tall and the rising city made her feel uneasy. Mismatched buckets and tarps littered the roofs. Water collectors. She had no way to tell which ones were recent and which were abandoned.

  Around noon, they got off the road to catch up on sleep and wait out the worst of the sun in an apartment above a hamburger stand. Before heading on, she and Mauser drilled with sticks to practice their knifeplay. Near the end, she worked out a new unarmed move with him that involved blocking an incoming high strike with her wrist, then letting her forearm collapse and driving her elbow into his jaw.

  "Can you show me that?" Martin said.

  She smiled. It was the first time he'd asked to join in. She walked him through it motion by motion and found the act of teaching someone less skilled forced her to visualize dynamics of movement she took for granted. He was clumsy and stiff, but she hoped he would continue training.

  They walked on. Towers climbed to their right, impossibly high, fantastic sentinels over the endless city. The highway began a shallow climb between glassy, glossy buildings with elegant curves and then through parks and tidy homes and a golf course gone feral.

  "There you go," Mauser said.

  Across a spotty, brownish field, a white palace grew from the earth the way coral grows from the sea. Banks of bluish windows tiled its sharp-lined levels. The trees and shrubs had outgrown their careful cultivation, and some had withered to elderly, waterless husks, but their placement still evoked a logic and beauty.

  "It looks like Lothlorien," Martin said.

  "Huh?" Raina said.

  "Elves," Mauser said. "It's going to burn down some day. We should have forced architects to build everything monumental out of rock. Now there's a material with staying power. You ever tried to punch a rock? I wouldn't."

  "Why did they make it so pretty?" Raina said.

  "It's a museum. Looking pretty is the only thing it does."

  They crossed an unkempt lawn. An amphitheater-like park was recessed in the grass. At its bottom, a burst of bushes crouched atop a swampy mire of rainwater. The doors were tall and stood open. As she went inside, Raina said a silent prayer to all the old things.

  The place had been looted. Ransacked. Vandalized. Shattered glass flanked the displays in sharp-edged skirts. On the walls, pale rectangles showed the ghosts of departed paintings. Statues lay toppled, marble pebbles strewn over the floor. Sunshine streamed from the skylights and illuminated dust and trash and dried-up feces.

  "This is a disgrace." Mauser's voice echoed in the sti
ll and empty space. "You can't just rob a museum. These are everyone's treasures!"

  "You were about to steal from it," Martin said.

  "Just one painting for Raina! And maybe a jade elephant for my trouble. That would leave at least 99.9% of the place unstolen."

  Raina moved quickly through the airy rooms, jogging up stairs with steel wire railings. There were no paintings left. In the upper floors, some statues remained, too heavy to lift, although several had been toppled. Some carvings and foreign artifacts remained, too, wooden masks and painted figures. Everyone else had considered them unworthy of the bother, but that didn't stop Mauser from scooping a few into his pack. Past the vast windows, Los Angeles spread out for miles, bowled in by the mountains, smudged by ocean-haze and the coming dusk.

  Mauser waited downstairs. "Well, the trip wasn't a total waste. Found this in the gift shop."

  He handed her an oversized book. It was a collection of Chagall prints. Vivid explosions of color. Surreal images of a bull with an umbrella and angels climbing a ladder to heaven. She could see why the man with the knives wanted one.

  Martin found a door to the basement. Its lock had been bashed in and it had been looted, too, stripped down to statues and carved trinkets. Raina's lantern flashed on a red lacquered stick a foot and a half long. She stooped for it. It had metal caps on both ends and the handle wiggled in her hand. She tugged on it and a single-edged blade slid free from its wooden sheath.

  She touched it to the back of her hand and drew blood. She gasped, lantern wavering. Colors rippled on its blade like molten moonlight. It was hundreds of years old she could feel its presence like she felt the beat and rumble of her own organs—the cut on her hand was not the first time it had tasted blood.

  She sheathed it with a click and tucked it in her belt. They stayed in one of the upper rooms overnight and slept without incident.

  "Well, here's the question," Mauser said in the morning. Yellow daylight flooded through the dusty windows. "What now?"

  "We keep looking," Raina said.

  "If you're bound and determined, I say we try to find another museum. This is one of the biggest cities in the world. It could take years to dig your needle out of this haystack."

  "Not if we go to Malibu."

  "Well, a week of fruitless searching should convince you better than I can. In the meantime, can we try Beverly Hills first? It's right here. Much closer than Malibu. And I guarantee you its former owners were just as wealthy."

  She hesitated, then agreed. They took the highway back to the city, then hung left onto Santa Monica Boulevard, passing glinting hotels and clothing shops on their way to the homes nestled in the hills and winding roads above the city. The houses were massive, some Spanish-style with orange roofs, others hard-cut modern things of glass and metal. Many had pools, now empty, or green and slimy from past rains. Some had tennis courts, too. Raina walked along in envious shock. Some of these homes, places people once lived, were as pretty as the Getty.

  Something scurried from a side yard. Raina glimpsed a shaggy beard and stained clothes. The sound of the man's feet faded in the distance.

  "Stay away from any house that looks clean," she said. "Anywhere with a garden or a way to gather water."

  "Sounds like you mean to split up," Mauser said.

  She nodded. "I don't want to be here any longer than we have to."

  "I brought these." Martin knelt and let down his pack. He extracted three plastic rectangles with blunt rubber antennas. "I don't know how great their range is, but we can let each other know if we see anything funny."

  "Walkie talkies?" Mauser laughed, taking one up. "I haven't had one of these since I played spy games as a kid. Well, for the record, I think this is very stupid, but let's meet back at that intersection. Dusk. I'm not busting into strange homes after dark."

  Raina intended to do just that—she didn't need as much sleep as they were getting—but agreed. She padded down the street.

  She had no problem opening doors. Breaking windows. She didn't think of them as homes. Homes were places people lived. These were just caves. Pieces of land closed off from the world. In each one, she paused in the doorway to listen, then walked quickly from room to room in search of the startling colors of Chagall. There were lots of stone and wooden floors and she didn't like the way her feet clapped through the high-ceilinged rooms. After three houses, she took off her shoes.

  There were bodies in some. Giant flat-screened TVs in all. Palatial kitchens with islands and multiple faucets. Sometimes there was clothing flung across the bedroom floors. Possibly looters, but in most cases, she thought they'd been left by someone moving as fast as possible to get away from the plague. There were many paintings, but no Chagalls.

  She walked up the steps to a yellow stucco manor and opened the door. Behind it, a man pointed a rifle in her face.

  "You hold right there," he murmured.

  "Wait," she said.

  "I seen you coming up the street. A little thief. Wants to slobber her mitts over what I got. Well, what I got is this rifle."

  "I don't want your things. I'm looking for a Chagall."

  His brows bent. "This is my home. Seems to me that gives me the right to smear you across my front steps."

  Raina had raised her hands. As the man spoke, she'd slowly lowered her elbows close to her waist. She pressed her elbow into the walkie talkie, depressing its button. Hurriedly, she spoke the man's address.

  He jerked up the gun. "What did you just say?"

  "I just told my friends where you live."

  "And gave me one more reason to part your skull!"

  "Raina?" Mauser asked over the device, voice fuzzy.

  She shook her head. "Let me go. I'll leave. That was my friend, and he isn't nice. If you hurt me, he'll put an icepick in your ear."

  The man smiled defiantly, then his lip curled into a snarl. "You get away from my house. I see you again, I shoot you. I don't care how many friends you got."

  "Agreed."

  With her hands still up, she backed down the steps. At the bottom, she turned around and headed straight for the sidewalk, expecting at any second to hear the crack of the gun—or nothing at all, just the abrupt, splinter-like removal of her soul from her body. The man watched her go, a shadow in his doorway, the gun held firm to his shoulder.

  Mauser was not happy to hear what had happened. "Communication is always a clumsy thing, but one language is universal: a gun in your face. It's time to go."

  "Then go," she said. "I'm finding my Chagall."

  "Raina, what's the big deal? You could have been shot. Is this knife-master of yours really that impressive?"

  "If you'd seen him, you would know."

  "What about that guy we saw?" Martin said. "The guy who ran away?"

  "Dude with the beard and the hobo-stink?" Mauser said. "Yeah, he looked like a real art aficionado."

  "If he lives here, we can hire him. As a guide. To keep us away from everyone else."

  "Martin!" Raina grinned. Martin blushed and smiled back, so pleased with himself she knew he'd do anything for her. She liked that thought. There was one thing all animals agreed on: it was always best to have an escape route.

  * * *

  Aided by the bearded man—Mauser had convinced him to lend his aid in exchange for a half-empty flask of liquor, two packs of Big Red gum, and a wooden panther nicked from the Getty—they searched the mansions of the hills in relative safety. But after four fruitless days, Mauser had had enough—or, as Raina suspected, had run out of space to carry any more jewelry.

  "Okay, this time I'm serious." He jerked his thumb south in the general direction of the Dunemarket. "That's where we belong. We're not doing anyone any good up here."

  Raina gathered up her things from the bedroom floor of the boat-like house where they'd centered their camp. "Not until I go to Malibu."

  "What is it with you and Malibu? There are no magic fish in its seas. Plenty of antique lamps, I'm sure, but I can
guarantee you none of them have wish-granting genies."

  "That's where my first mom always wanted us to live." She put her dirty socks in her bag and let her hands hang there, helpless. "She told me that when we made it to Malibu, we'd never want anything again."

  "Oh, for the love of criminy, you played the 'my dead birth mother' card. Well, it's bought you one more leg of this idiot's odyssey. Then we're going home."

  They took Santa Monica Boulevard all the way to the coast. It felt good to be back on the ocean, away from the July-baked city. It was cooler, refreshed by afternoon breezes you could set a clock by. Ahead, the hills ran down to the sea and the highway curved along their base. It was already close to evening but she thought they could make half the walk to Malibu before bedding down. After an hour, she'd counted three mile markers along the coast-hugging road.

  Martin pointed out to sea. "What's that?"

  A single strand of houses separated them from the sand. Raina shielded her eyes against the sunlight angling in from the horizon. A hundred yards out from where the waves began to break, a fat black lump sat idle on the surface.

  "A whale?" Mauser said.

  "It isn't moving."

  "A dead whale."

  Martin's walkie talkie popped. He started, slapping at his belt. The transmitter clicked rapidly.

  "We should go," Raina said.

  "I think it's like a boat," Martin said. "Let me get out my radio."

  "Martin—"

  The brush stirred across the road. Raina whirled and drew her knife from its red lacquer sheath. A man emerged onto the asphalt. He looked sickly—gaunt, ivory-pale, his bare torso tattooed with symbols from a language Raina had never seen—but she knew the look in his eye. A seer. A hunter. A man who's gone to all the worst places and come back alive.

  20

  Walt ran up the hill, flashlight jarring in his hand, providing him a sporadic glimpse of his footing on the road ahead. "What was that?"

  "What do you think?"

  "Do you guys have a lot of explosions here?"