The man blinked against the breeze. Scars laced his arms and chest and face. A gull cawed and Martin flinched.
"Well, what we have here is the typical impasse of two strange parties away from home," Mauser said. "In the interest of both parties, why don't we just smile, back away, and—"
"Are you from the island?" the man said.
"Catalina?" Raina said.
The man went for his pocket.
Raina lunged forward and pushed her knife against his corded neck. "I hate every man there! I want to wade in their blood. Burn down their houses and throw their bones in the ocean."
Ignoring the knife against his neck, the pale man laughed, a croaking, awful sound. "After all that's happened, you're still trying to kick the shit out of each other."
"Right," Mauser said. "Who are you?"
"I don't know."
Martin frowned. "Are you all right? Do you have amnesia?"
"My name is from a language that's never been spoken." He shifted his eyes to Raina. "Get that damn knife off me."
She moved it sideways a fraction of an inch, daring the killing steel to draw blood. "Why should I?"
The man looked to the black shape in the sea. "If you harm me, my brothers will never stop hunting you."
"Your brothers," Mauser said. The man didn't move. "You're talking about the pilots of that submarine over yonder? Did you capture it from the invaders?"
"The aliens?" Martin said. "What's it like? How did you figure out how to get it to go?"
"Because the aliens are still in it," Raina said. The pale man smiled. She relaxed the knife from his throat. "Why did you ask if we were from the island?"
"So I'd know whether to kill you." "Implying you wouldn't otherwise," Mauser said. "Excellent. I propose we shake hands, tip our hats, and toddle our separate ways."
"Are you going to fight them?" Raina said.
"Soon," the man said.
"So are we. We could fight them together. Wipe them out."
The man was silent for a long while. "Can't trust you. When the fear comes, humans break down. Collapse. Betray each other to save their own skins."
"But you were thinking about it?" Mauser said. He had a strange gleam in his eye. One that Raina wasn't sure she liked.
The pale man nodded. "I want them dead, too."
"I don't suppose you've got a cell number in case you change your mind."
"Sure, but I prefer Skype."
"Oh well, neither do we." Mauser smiled brightly and extended his hand. "Are we at least agreed not to murder each other?"
"For now."
They shook. Mauser leaned in and clapped him on the back. The man looked uncomfortable. Not to be touched by another man. To be touched by a human.
Mauser withdrew, rocked on his heels, and jammed his hands in his pockets. With his chin, he gestured across the road to the ocean. "After you."
The pale man walked across the road, crossed a half-dead lawn, reached the sand, and walked straight into the water. The waves swirled over his head. A minute later, steam boiled from the black vessel, snorting in twin gouts like the nose of a dragon in the cartoons Raina watched as a child. It sank into the sea.
"Why did you let him go?" she said. "We could have slaughtered the Catalinans together."
"Are you serious?" Mauser said. "He looked like a cross between a Maori warrior and a dead lamprey."
"That's how I know he'd make a good ally."
"The thing about getting into bed with the devil is that it's the devil. Nothing but spines down there." He shuddered and waved his hand down the road. "Anyway, if you'd gone all Voltron with him, you'd have to end this ultra-important quest for a dead guy's doodles."
Martin's walkie talkie spewed clicks and pops, then went silent. He turned the volume up until the static hissed. Hearing nothing more, he put it away. "I don't think we should stay."
"There you go, two to one, Raina," Mauser said. "Unless you fancy a swim, let's extract ourselves from Dodge."
She gazed over the sea. Far to the south, the black shell of the main ship loomed like an island. She drew a circle between her shoulders, brow, and chest, then traced a line down its middle. The moon wouldn't help her here; she was hunting, but not for blood. She would have to be extra careful.
They reached Malibu the next morning. After the way her first mom had spoken of the place, Raina expected more than the beaches, canyons, manors, cafes, and brush-clogged hills. It was pretty, but no more so than the south shore of the peninsula where she'd lived with her second family.
Virtually all the town hugged the coast, with a few tentacular roads probing into the canyons. That made for an easy search. They split up, each taking a walkie talkie, and went door to door, watchful for any signs of people lurking behind the boldly painted doors. Half of the front doors were unlocked. All the houses were desolate. Plenty of things. No people.
Few of the things were worth caring about. Some cans of food that might be good if they were cooked long enough. Assorted batteries, although most of them were leaking juice, corroded by time and sea air. Plenty of paintings. Just like Beverly Hills, none were what she was searching for. In one marble-floored villa, she found a hanging of an abstract swirl of flower-bright reds and yellows. With the help of a chair, she got it down and radioed Mauser and Martin, but Mauser dismissed it as something called a Kandinsky.
"Which is amazing," he said. "Any right-thinking person would happily settle for a Kandinsky. 'Settle' isn't even the right word. This thing might have cost more than the house it's in."
Raina shook her head. "He wants a Chagall."
"Well, what the grumpy, demanding, would-be kung fu master wants, the grumpy, demanding, would-be kung fu master gets."
Martin and Mauser's luck was no better, although their bags grew lumpier by the day. After two days of steady westward searching, she discovered why none of the homes were inhabited. Just past a college campus, a rampart of rock and mud lay piled across the road, running all the way down to the sea. Above it, the hills were charred, young brush sprouting from the sooty soil.
Raina stopped and glanced back down the highway. Was this a sign? She'd seen mudslides before at Palos Verdes, but this one was right across the road. As if the earth itself were warding people away from what waited beyond. But that could be a trick, too. A ploy to turn back seekers before they found the treasure. If it were a ruse, and she fell for it, the earth would surely frown on her. It might even close the way forever.
Before she could make a decision, Mauser hopped on a rock and climbed up the rubble. She followed him. On the other side, a man and a woman stood on the highway below the mudslide. They had rifles in their hands but hadn't yet aimed them.
"My name is Mauser!" he called. "There, we're not strangers. Now it would be a crime to shoot us."
A white-haired woman tipped her head. "You don't know my name."
"April? You look very much like an April." He glanced down to ensure his footing, then presented the couple with a smile. "You saw us on the other side of town. Busting in doors and such."
"Yep."
"And you're here to tell us to turn around and go back the way we came."
"Yep."
"We're not here to cause trouble. All we want is a painting."
"Looters," the man grunted. Like his wife, he was old, with a salt and pepper goatee. But the woman was as lean as Raina. The man had a doughy gut that would collapse under a punch.
"You have us all wrong," Mauser said. "We're not wanton robbers stuffing our pockets with anything that sparkles. We are the agents of a highly respected man—a master martial artist, once renowned both in America and in his home country—and at his behest, we are here to find one of the works of Marc Chagall." He lifted one shoulder, stirring his heavy pack. "I have a book of his paintings right here. Would you like to see it?"
The woman shook her head, shifting her rifle. "Nope. We got a community to look after."
"You see, our employer—"
"Doesn't draw shit around here," the man laughed. He had a gravelly, musing voice and leonine silver hair. "We all used to be somebody, man. Things changed."
"Sweet strikes and gutterballs," Mauser murmured. "Are you—?"
"What did I just tell you? None of us is anyone."
"Well, Mr. Person I Might Truly Have Once Adored Like Your Own Mother, then understand what I'm about to tell you isn't a threat, but rather a gesture of my deepest appreciation for you or the man you resemble." He jerked a thumb at Raina. "See this girl here?"
"Yeah."
"See that knife on her belt? Big red Japanese one?"
The man raised a shaggy brow. "You're sure this isn't a threat?"
"Those pirates on Catalina killed her father. Kidnapped her mother. She's here to become the pupil of the aforementioned martial artist, who refuses to teach her stab-one unless she brings him a Chagall. If she does, then once her training is complete, she can sail to the island and defeat all who stand between her and her mother. This must sound like a fairy tale, but on Donny's grave, I swear to you it's the truth."
"What it sounds is crazy," said the woman.
"But not half as crazy as this girl is." Mauser shot Raina a worried look. "She's got it in her head we'll find the painting here. If she isn't allowed to search, I don't know what she'll do. That isn't a bluff. I seriously have no fucking idea."
The woman laughed. "Get shot, most likely."
"Well, possibly. These days, that's a likely fate for anyone. But I've got a proposal that will leave all of us unshot and unstabbed. Let us have a look around. We won't take a thing. Not so much as a sip of water. All we want is the painting. The painting that will let this little girl rescue her mother."
"Chagall," the man muttered. He turned to his wife. "Didn't Willis used to have one of those?"
"For Pete's sake, you're not actually considering this."
"Well?"
The woman put her hands on her hips. "No one's coming into town with a gun."
"Agreed," Raina said.
"Wait a minute," Mauser said.
The woman counted off points on her fingers. "Second, you don't touch any homes that got a person in them. There aren't many, but the few there are are sacrosanct. My husband will show you what to avoid. Third, you get three days. When time's up, no sob stories about how you're homeless or you're too sick to travel. You see the sun?" She pointed up. It was nearing noon. "When it reaches that spot three days from now, you march on back to L.A."
"Deal," Raina said.
With a sigh, Mauser turned over all three of his pistols. Martin handed his over without complaint. Raina didn't have one but the woman wanted to take away her blades. When she clung to the one from the Getty, the man allowed that maybe she could hang onto it—there were coyotes around, you know.
The woman showed them to a house where they'd be allowed to stay. It was very nice. Raina didn't care. They dropped off their bags and followed the man around town. He went to the Willis place first, but if it had once held their painting, it wasn't there any longer.
Raina's spirit endured. She went door to door, skipping only the houses the man warned her away from. Martin helped comb the sprawling estates while Mauser spent most of his time chatting about movies with the old man. Raina's annoyance mounted. Movies were part of the old world. They were wasting time.
One day ticked by like nothing at all. The second slipped away just as swiftly. The third night, Raina didn't sleep, escaping the house while the others slept. She ranged into the canyons north of town, remotest from the road. The waves thundered below her. She ran from room to room and house to house. Light peeped over the eastern mountains, bouncing from ten million waves, failing to penetrate the misty haze enshrouding the city halfway across the bay. She ran back to the house and threw herself down in her bed. Not five minutes later, a door creaked open in the hall.
The old man came around. Raina ran back to the canyons. Her steps echoed in tomblike foyers. Her heart thudded in her aching head. She willed the sun not to climb. It denied her.
"Raina!" Mauser's voice rang out from the beaches below. "Raaaina!"
She wandered into the mansion's yard and plopped down beneath a naked cliff. It wasn't fair. She had searched for so long. Traveled so far. Effort was supposed to yield reward. All she had for her work was sore feet, a pounding head, and a belly that was growing more and more angry eating so much freeze dried food.
"Raina!"
She wiped her eyes and stood. Motion stirred on the rocks above her. A gecko sat in the sun. It was yellow with a bit of blue on its tail. Black spots dotted its skin. It jerked its head and stared her in the eye.
She froze, overwhelmed by the power of the omen. Every beast and man in her family of souls held its breath.
The gecko dashed into the rocks. She flung herself at the cliff, clawing for purchase. A stone clattered away from her hand. Mauser yelled from way down below, joined by the gravelly bellow of the old man. Raina gritted her teeth, found a new hold, and spidered up to the ledge where the gecko had been. It startled again, dashing up the scarp.
She followed it, running awkwardly up the pitched slope. It scrambled over a ridge. She reached the top and froze. She could no longer hear its tiny claws ticking on the stones.
Before her, a white palace claimed the plateau, more hills mounded behind it. The sunlight blared from its white marble pillars. Half blind, fingers bleeding, she walked toward it.
* * *
They dragged a wagon back with them to the south. Between it and Raina's insistence that they only travel at night, which hardly lasted nine hours at this time of year, it took three days to return to the peninsula. Mauser and Martin came with her to the cliffs at the southwestern sweep of the point, but she stopped them out of eyeshot of the man's home.
"Thank you for coming with me," she said. "But the next step of my journey I must take alone."
Mauser laughed and rolled his eyes. "At least I can say I knew you when."
Martin hugged her. "Good luck."
She rolled the wagon down the street, parking it on the sidewalk in front of the house. She picked up the painting, staggering under its awkward, doorish size, propped it against the wooden post holding up the roof above the man's porch, and knocked on the front door.
The man from the beach answered. He had a knife in one hand. His jaw dropped.
She began her training.
22
"You realize how little sense that makes," Walt said. "If you're being attacked over there, the safest place to be is anywhere else."
"What are you doing here?" She kicked an empty bottle slanting from the sand. "Getting drunk?"
"It's pretty fun. Ever tried it? You could use it."
"Excuse me if I don't laugh. My people are dying."
He almost walked away. He grabbed his pack instead. "Don't you want to know what I learned?"
She'd been walking toward the faraway boat. She stopped and turned. "Do you have a way to get onto the ship?"
"No."
"Shocking."
He trudged behind her. He couldn't figure out whether the rift between them was her fault or his. The fact of the matter was he'd agreed to come here. Agreed to help. Both he and the islanders had expected him to do just that. Instead, his suggestions backfired. Drew down the assaults Karslaw had feared all along.
He knew this wasn't his fight. So what if they'd pinned their hopes on him? If this had all been a stupid idea, that was Karslaw's blame, not his. He ought to leave before things got worse and the islanders—or their leader—turned their anger on Walt. The only thing he stood to gain from this was Lorna, and she looked like less of a prize every day.
But that was because she resented him for failing. She was scared. They all were. Scared of an enemy that just wouldn't go away.
That was why he followed her to the boat. He still had work to do.
They rowed to the sailboat and cast off. He stood on the deck and wat
ched the gulls circling over the mothership. It must have its own ecosystems by now. Barnacles and mussels on the hull. Crabs scuttling over the anemones stuck in the tidepools of its crevices. Fish taking shelter in the wreckage, nibbling algae while predators lurked in the waters beyond.
Meanwhile, people harbored in the city and the islands, hiding away from the threat growing inside the ship itself.
Avalon's main pier had been damaged during the beach raid and Lorna guided them into the smaller one at the Scaveteria. Karslaw had a runner waiting for Walt. His presence was requested immediately. Walt sighed and followed him over the hills to the palace.
Karslaw saw him in the same room they'd first spoken in. There was no fire in the hearth today. Spiderwebs hung between the naked beams of the ceiling. At their first meeting, Karslaw had been invigorated, swollen with fight and fury, laughing with the life of it all.
Today, he sat in a stuffed chair, his feet tucked under it like a child at school. His eyelids were puffy, sleepless or hungover or both. He directed Walt to a chair and combed his fingers through his beard.
"I'm going to tell you some things. Dangerous things. Things I would never tell an outsider except when I had no other choice."
Walt rubbed the back of his neck. "I'll wait to be honored until I hear what they are."
"My motives for this are many. Foremost, I need to know where we sit so I can decide how to move forward. Second, I need to light a fire under you. And lastly, if things keep on as they've been keeping on, it won't matter who knows what, because none of us will be left to act on that knowledge."
"That's dramatic. If it's that dire, why don't you pile into those boats of yours and sail some place less infested?"
Karslaw shook his head vaguely. "It took five years to build this island. Much as I may look like the king of the castle, not all my people would follow. And I will not leave a single one of them behind to die."
"Really? So a few of your people decide to commit suicide, and your response to that is to condemn everyone else to death with them? If that's leadership, it explains a lot about the former American political process."
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 93