"No." Lorna wasn't breathing hard yet. "Maybe it followed you here."
All things considered, his pack was light for a multi-day journey, with maybe twenty pounds of blankets and water and such hanging from his shoulders. But it was enough to force him into an awkward, bouncing stride that battered his back. He pulled up and knelt down.
"What are you doing?" Lorna said.
"Hurrying."
"By sitting down."
He flung away dirty jeans, spare shoes. "Fixing it so I can run without feeling like a duck with gout."
She did the same, putting a pistol and a bottle of water into a small shoulder bag. Walt's laser was with him because he carried it everywhere. He kicked the rest of his stuff off the road, then set a white stone on the asphalt to mark the spot. They ran.
Over the next hill, lights shimmered in the windows of the palace. A man shouted orders. The road ran within a hundred feet of its palisade. Lorna jagged onto the road leading to the drawbridge, which was lowered. A gaggle of men spoke behind it.
Lorna called out her name as she approached. "What's happening?"
"Attack on Avalon," one of them said.
"O.C.'s?"
"Dunno. No radio, just the lanterns." He pointed across the valley. On a hill overlooking the road, two lights burned. "Coming with?"
She shook her head. "We'll see you there."
She raced back to the main road, Walt on her heels. Back when he was an out-of-shape smoker, he couldn't have run to the corner bodega, but that part of his life was six years and many thousands of miles behind him. He ran at just under a dead sprint, spilling over the hill to Avalon minutes later.
A fire burned on the beach. Smoke blew crosswise over the dark shore. People screamed. A blue beam cut across the sands.
"Those aren't humans," Walt said.
Lorna grunted, then started forward. "Come on."
"Did you hear what I just said? About the humans those aren't?"
"I don't care what they are. They're attacking my people. They need to die."
Walt laughed and followed her down. A machine gun opened up, racketing across the beach. Lorna swerved down a back road. Three blocks from the shore, a man slumped on the corner, holding his forehead and dripping blood onto the sidewalk. Lorna hit the esplanade and crouched beside the corner of a Peet's coffee house.
Walt got down beside her. Lasers flashed from the other side of the beach, focused on a makeshift barricade of debris strung across the road. Rifles boomed from behind it, orange flashes answering the blue beams of the attackers. Directly across from Walt and Lorna, a young woman hobbled up the beach, limping heavily. A tangle of limbs rushed behind her. The thing straightened a tentacle, aiming.
Lorna ran from the corner, firing her pistol at the alien as she went. Her first shots showed no effect; the fifth or six staggered it. It continued after the limping woman. Walt charged behind Lorna, but her body did a near-perfect job of blocking his shot.
The limping woman screamed and collapsed. The alien shot her with a short flick of light and turned its tentacle toward Lorna. She shot it somewhere in the body, knocking it back a step. Its blue beam splayed over the roofs behind the esplanade. Dust popped in small white bursts. Lorna closed on the creature, emptying her pistol and flinging it in the enemy's long, ovoid face. It slapped a tentacle at the incoming gun, distracted. Lorna bowled right into its body.
Metal flashed in her hand. A line of light lanced from the alien, searing the sand into glass. Walt swung around it, aimed his laser at its thudding feet, and pushed the trigger-buttons. Lorna screamed. He jerked back his hand and stopped shooting. Her knife winked again and plunged into the thing's chitinous hide. It didn't make a sound. It scrabbled for her neck with a pincer and she ducked her chin and stabbed again, the blade skittering off its side. It backhanded her with a tentacle, bashing her into the sand.
Walt shot it in the head. One of its bulbous eyes ejected in a jet of superheated steam. Its body slapped to the ground, twitching dumbly.
Lorna wasn't moving. Her eyes were half open, showing their whites. Walt checked her wrist and found a pulse. He glanced down the shore. The fighting remained concentrated around the barricade. The other woman moaned, pawing at the sand. Walt got down, rolled Lorna onto his shoulder, stood, steadied himself, and slogged back to the road.
He carried her two blocks down the street, not certain where he was going except away from the danger. Footsteps rang out ahead. Walt leaned against a wall and drew his laser.
A man skidded to a stop, mouth wide. "Is that Lorna?"
"She's hurt," Walt said.
He nodded. "Come with me."
Walt followed him down the street, breathing hard. Just as he was ready to call for help carrying her, his guide held open the door to an unmarked building. A light wavered down the hall.
"Doctor's inside," the man said. "I'll take it from here."
"I'm not leaving her," Walt said.
"If we don't drive those things out, we're all dead. Get your ass to the beach."
Walt wiped his forearm across his face, slicking off some of the humidity-induced sweat. "Right. Well, if I die and she doesn't, tell her I love her."
The man looked up sharply. "You do?"
"Not like that," he said, feelingly incredibly stupid for bothering to keep up her ruse at a time like this. "We bonded on our trip. Look, just tell her. She'll know what I mean."
"Yeah," the man said slowly.
Walt exited into the street. Men hollered over the roar of gunfire. He ran within a block of the esplanade, then turned parallel to it, making for the barricade. Chairs and boards and tables cluttered the street. Fires burned in several places. Twenty-odd men took cover in the less-flaming parts of the rubble, firing out to sea. Walt poked up his head. No aliens. No lights.
Bullets plowed white roostertails from the calm waters of the bay. Bubbles roiled the surface. A naked man as pale as unworked dough dashed across the sand, laughed, and plunged into the waves. Steam rose from a black shape waiting offshore.
"The ship!" a man shouted. "Shoot the ship!"
Bullets pinged against the vessel, ricocheting away with drunken whirrs. The shape vanished into the sea.
Half the men fanned out, jogging down the nearby streets, sweeping the strand along the beach.
Walt tapped the shoulder of a man whose face was half-masked with soot. "What happened?"
The man's mouth hung half open. "They hit the dock. Blasted our flagship before we knew they were here. Boom, firewood. Then the boats next to it—pow. Fleet's crippled. We got our people down here just in time to catch them crawling up the beach. They dived back into the water as soon as they saw us." He grinned, teeth bloody. "Guess we scared 'em."
"Doubt it," Walt said. "They're not human. Their brains are filled with yellow muck and alien ideas."
"You're an expert?" The man tipped back his head, recognition dawning on his face. "Hey. You're the guy Lorna hauled back here. Been flinging rafts at the mothership one after the other."
"You really think that's a coincidence?" said a second man, bearded, his long hair tied behind his head.
The first man gave Walt an angry smile. "You can't seem to stop getting my friends killed, can you? Hannigan. Ramon. Ken. How many more you think you cost us tonight?"
"Like how many did I personally shoot?" Walt said. "Zero. These things have been trying to kill us for five years now. Are you actually blaming me for fighting back?"
"Bullshit. We ain't been attacked once those five years. Not here on the island. You been stirring them up. You're the one who took down their big ship, huh? Maybe they came here for revenge on you. But they didn't see you, so they ran off."
"That's the stupidest thing—"
Knuckles pounded into his eye. White light blinded him, pain spiking his skull. He crashed to the asphalt, scraping his elbow. The longhaired man grinned down at him. Still on his back, Walt slammed his heel into the man's knee. The man howled and d
ropped. Walt rolled to the side, popped up on his knees, and jabbed the man's chin, bouncing his head against the road.
The first man kicked at Walt's head. He flung himself back, staggering to his feet, and put up his guard. Other soldiers circled him, faces grim in the light of the fires burning from the barricade. Walt's head pounded, nausea pooling in his gut.
"What the fuck!" Karslaw bellowed.
The man across from Walt took on a sober look. The other men and women froze. Walt blinked heavily. His eye was already swelling.
"Is your blood thundering so loud you forget our dead are lying on the beach?" Karslaw bulged his eyes. "Get ours to the clinic basement. Get theirs on a wagon and take it to the capital. Everything they brought, too. I so much as see an alien toothpick in anyone's hands but mine, I dangle you off the pier and see what I can catch."
He seemed to shrink a couple inches, softening his voice. "You fought with pride tonight. They tried to step on our land and you beat them back—but we don't know they're gone. Watch the water until we know Avalon is safe."
He raised his fist. The troops matched his salute and scattered for the beach. The man who'd first spoken to Walt crouched beside the longhaired man and shook his shoulder. The downed man groaned.
Karslaw turned to Walt and crooked a finger. "Walk with me."
"What's up?" Walt said.
Karslaw strode back up the street. "You tell me. I bring you here to stop those things. Not two weeks after you arrive, they're bombarding my shore."
"Are you claiming the two are related?"
"I'm claiming I'm mighty fucking mad that half a dozen of my brothers just died."
"Lorna was hurt, too," Walt said. "I have to see her."
He turned toward the triage center. Karslaw grabbed his shoulder and bent down to his eye level. "Where are we at, Walt?"
"Confused. Worried. And not too happy about earning a black eye when all I've done is try to help."
The big man sighed, straightening. "I'm not being fair to you. I'm angry, Walt. It's my cross to bear. Judging by my shoulders, it's a god damn big one, too." He grinned wryly. "No more rafts. I don't know if they caused this attack, but we can't ignore the timing. Put that big brain of yours toward a new plan, son. Prove I didn't sacrifice good men in vain."
"Nice speech," Walt said.
Karslaw chuckled huskily. "I'm sorry. In leading, I've discovered the higher you elevate your words, the more gravity there is to push your people to action. Sometimes I forget to turn off the rhetoric when I'm speaking face to face.
"But I mean what I say. Figure it out. Our asses are on the line."
He clapped Walt's shoulder and walked away. Walt rubbed his face and went to see Lorna.
She had bruised ribs. A possible concussion. No laser burns. She was awake and aware enough to speak, though she didn't give him more than monosyllables. After five minutes of one-sided conversation about what had happened on the beach, Walt rolled his eyes and walked away.
On his arrival in Avalon, Karslaw had offered him a bottle of clear, home-brewed liquid and the assurance it was vodka. Walt grabbed it from his house and trudged back across the hills to where he and Lorna had ditched their stuff. It was a childish gesture—going back to get her clothes and gear would only make her feel worse about not speaking to him after saving her life—but after several drinks from the bottle, which tasted like vodka inasmuch as it tasted like throat-searing alcohol, it seemed like a pretty swell idea.
The sun rose somewhere along the way. By the time he found their bags, his skull felt like it was sharing two headaches. Home was much too far away. He tied a blanket between the shrubs to form some shade and went to sleep.
He wasted one day nursing his hangover. He wasted a second waiting for her to come to him. On the third, he went to her home and knocked on her door. She answered. She had a bruise on her cheek and moved stiffly but otherwise looked no worse for wear.
"Take me to the mainland," he said.
"You're leaving?" Her eyes went blank. "Is this about the other night? I was so tired. In pain. I just wanted to sleep."
"Did you know the woman on the beach? You attacked that thing with a knife. What were you thinking?"
"You of all people should understand," she said. "I wanted revenge."
He laughed. "There's a lot of that going around, isn't there? It's more virulent than the Panhandler."
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay. I do understand. It's like a fire. The only way to quench it is with death."
"About us." She touched his shoulder. "I know I'm hard to be with. Now more than ever. I used to make jokes. I bet you don't believe me, but I did. It just doesn't feel that funny anymore."
"Really? To me it feels like the biggest joke ever told." He glanced down the street. A woman was walking a fat black dog. You would never know aliens had bombed the docks three days earlier. "You gonna take me to L.A. or not?"
"Please don't go. You just got here. We still need you."
He let out a long sigh. "I'm not leaving. I just want to take a look at the ship. See if I can figure out a new way to stuff a potato up its tailpipe."
"You want to go see the ship." She smiled. "Of course. I'll need a couple days to square things away."
"Whatever you need."
Once she was ready, the trip was completely uneventful. Lorna brought another woman with her to help her sail. She anchored a short ways off the north flank of the peninsula and rowed him to shore in a dinghy. He flung his stuff above the tideline. She hugged him.
"Three days?"
"Should be enough," he said. "See you then."
She rowed back to the boat. He hoisted his bag and walked along the ribbon-like bike path at the base of the cliffs between the beach and the buildings. Fifteen miles away, the broken ship bulged from the sea.
A couple hundred yards away, a man stood on the sand, casting his line into the breakers. He turned to watch Walt pass. Walt raised his hand. The man hesitated, then waved back. Gulls sat on the flat sand above the tide in packs of fifty, beaks pointed toward the sea. Heat baked off the beach. Walt wiggled off his shirt, wrapped his head with it, and had a couple drinks, one of water, one of moonshine.
He wasn't too happy with himself. His thing with Lorna was a mess and his progress vis-a-vis the aliens was underwhelming at best. Each problem felt equally impossible. One was a half-mile-wide vessel with an automated defense system more advanced than any human had ever dealt with, and the other was a woman.
He laughed. Where was a rimshot when you needed one.
The trail took him past rock jetties, kelp-strewn beaches, two more fishermen, a woman surfing, a marina/pier complex, another pier, a small fishing boat, loads of garbage, evidence of three campfires, and several dozen sets of footprints, most of them weathered by the wind. The few people watched warily until he passed down the concrete trail. People used to throng to these beaches every day, completely untroubled by the hundreds of strangers playing volleyball and sunning themselves. Funny how a little thing like the end of the world put everyone on edge.
After a detour around another much larger marina, he found himself in Santa Monica. The beach was hundreds of yards deep. He plunked down just above the upper wash of the waves, got out his bottle, and screwed it into the sand.
Excluding his recent bender, it had been a long time since he'd been drunk. He felt good, relaxed. People had used to say that drinking alone was the true sign you had a problem, but he disagreed. There was no better way to think through an unsolvable problem than to grab a bottle and go get shitfaced in the wilderness by your lonesome. If nothing else, it was a good way to remind yourself that you chose to be wherever you were; that there were always other options; that if things got really, really bad, you could always walk off into the woods, metaphorically or literally. Put it all behind you. Become a whole new person. He'd done it himself.
He pulled the bottle from the sand and had another drink. It was high summer—August, prob
ably, although who gave a damn—and although he'd been traveling all day, first by boat, then by foot, the sun was just now setting behind the wreck of the mothership, yellow beams catching its black edges, painting deep shadows across the valleys of its deadened hull. A tremendous chunk of it had broken off and settled just above the surface; water coursed through the channel between it and the body of the ship. He squinted through his binoculars but couldn't see any movement.
He woke, which meant he was alive, which meant he had stuff to do. He watched the ocean churning along. After a while, a black fin cut through the waves and he got a little thrill, imagining there were big old sharks right out there, but then its back rose from the water, followed by its fluke. A dolphin. He sighed.
Others swam with it, fins breaking the surface at predictable intervals. They swam parallel to the shore, unhurried, then disappeared. A minute later, much further out, closer to the ship than to him, one leapt clean of the water and splashed back down.
He frowned. He took a drink to cut the phlegm and clear his head. Bottle was almost empty. He resolved to do a bit of scavenging in the restaurants back at the strand. Must be a bottle of something somewhere. He went for a swim, toweled off, then poked around the cafes until afternoon.
The next morning, a figure walked up the beach, black hair fluttering behind her. A sailboat sat at anchor a mile further down the shore.
"Can't you count?" Walt said. "You're a day early."
Lorna glanced at the fallen ship, as if afraid it might spring to life then and there. "There's been another attack. They wiped out the fort. You have to come with me."
21
The pale man's hand drifted toward his pocket. Raina drew her knife. Mauser produced a pistol.
"Don't even think about it," he said. "Because the act of thinking about a thing makes you feel like you have tacit permission to do that thing. But what do you think will happen if you reach into your pocket?"
"You'll shoot." The man's voice was hoarse and broke on the last word. His eyes hardened. "Don't you dare threaten me."
"Then don't move," Raina said.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 92