Karslaw chuckled, regaining a little of his old light. "I wish I'd had you sooner. As it is, here is where we stand. We are withdrawing from the mainland. I won't waste my troops on Long Beach street gangs when I need them here at home. That means abandoning the mainlanders to the gangs instead. I'd hoped to make them one with our people. But hopes are will-o-wisps leading us away from truths, aren't they?"
"Indeed, my liege," Walt said.
"Watch yourself," he chuckled. "So we withdraw. Regroup. But this island isn't safe from the enemy in the bay. They will continue to hound us. They will continue to breed. As we grow weaker, they grow stronger."
Karslaw leaned back and pressed his palms together, fingers splayed. "That's the logic of it. Hit them while we're still strong enough to throw a punch. And the sooner we act, the better my chances of hanging onto the mainland, too. But you don't use logic to fire up the troops. What do I say to convince their hearts? Better to die as warriors than as our conquerors' cattle? Nobler to stride into the grave than to lie in it?"
"That sounds a lot better than 'Rush in willy-nilly and hope it's alien nap-time.'"
"We may be overthinking this. Getting into the ship is a Gordian knot. If you can't unravel it, I'll cut straight through it."
"By flinging your men face-first into missiles?"
He shook his head. "We don't know that it's capable of destroying more than a single target. If we send in decoys first and follow them in with our fastest boats, we may confound their defenses."
"Or you wind up as shrimp food," Walt said. "I hope they like beard."
Karslaw grimaced, patience deserting him. "Then soothe my stress-itched mind with a better idea."
Walt screwed up his face. "How many pistols you got?"
"Plenty. The mainlanders have been passing along the spares to help deal with this menace." He frowned, bristling his beard. "Pistols are no good. You can hardly hit what's right in front of you. We don't know how many of those things are onboard. We need firepower. Rifles. Automatics."
"Yeah."
"Then why would you want pistols?"
"Tight quarters in there," Walt said. "I'm still thinking. That's the third option besides charging in ASAP or abandoning L.A., you know. Give yourself the time to hammer out a solid plan."
"How many weeks have I already given you? When thought hits a rut, action is what frees you. You have three weeks to give me something better. Any plan that takes longer than that to work out would be too complicated for us to execute in the first place."
Walt left angry, mostly because Karslaw was right. Not necessarily about the timeline or the ludicrous suite of external pressures he appeared to be dealing with. But because it sounded like a lot of people were about to die, and if Walt were just a little smarter, they could be saved.
* * *
He didn't see much of anyone for a while. He spent most of his time in his house doodling or taking notes. At night, he wandered around the shrubs and grass in the hills behind Avalon, turning the same set of questions over in his head. When he did step out during the day—sometimes to get food, sometimes to pull things from the Scaveteria and see what it took to make them float—he saw change. Soldiers standing guard in the streets and on the beach. Boats massing. The rasp of scrapers on hulls. Men tinkered with engines, wiping oily hands on their pants. Karslaw was assembling his fleet. Soon, it would make its first and likely last attack.
Avalon threw a party. Walt wasn't quite sure what it was for. Possibly something war-related, but between the fireworks popping over the bay and all the drunken singing rolling up from downtown, he had the impression it was independence-related, maybe the anniversary of New Catalina's founding. He didn't join them in person, but went back to his house for a bottle to join them in spirit.
More singing. Bonfires on the beach, complete with public displays of dancing. They'd even rigged up an electric guitar to go with the drums, horns, and singer, who had to shout as loud as he could for his unaided voice to be heard over the instruments. The crowd joined in to help him out. All together, their tones sounded better than the lone man's harsh strain. They covered up each other's off notes. Blended together in surprising and pleasing ways. A bit sloppy, falling out of time, having audible difficulty hitting the more extreme notes, but overall far prettier than any but the most talented singers could manage on their own.
How many places like this were left in the world? Where there were enough people—and they were safe enough—to throw a dance party/kegger? A couple of the Maya groups had held festivals and holidays. There must be other groups scattered around the planet, too. But they must have been vanishingly rare, especially on the scale of Avalon, which had done more than survive. It had rebuilt. Hung onto the luxury of culture. Because Karslaw had had a vision of bringing the survivors to a new land.
And now he was about to let that vision and the feelings it kindled be snuffed out.
Walt woke with a hangover. Lorna was out, so he hung around on her porch until she wandered in. She offered him a brief hug.
"Late night?" she said.
"A lot of thinking."
"Turn up anything useful?"
"I swam out to it, Lorna. When I was in Santa Monica, I got good and drunk, swam out to the ship, and climbed aboard. I sat on its hull and I walked around and then I swam back."
She gaped. "You swam to the ship?"
"The dolphins were doing it."
"That's your excuse? The dolphins did it first? While you were out there, did you also eat raw sardines and ram sharks with your nose?"
He waggled his arms. "Look at me. One piece. No missile-wounds. I don't know if it's not programmed to shoot at organic targets because of all the animals or if their gunner fell asleep at the wheel or what. But if I made it there, maybe your whole army can."
The derision faded from her eyes. "That's a long swim."
"Less than a quarter mile. Anyone fit to fight can swim that far."
"Not with all their gear. You can't swim through a quarter mile of waves holding a rifle above your head."
"I know. And if we try to float it over on a raft, the aliens will just blast it to bits. That's what I've been stuck on. My best idea is to stick pistols and ammo in Ziploc bags and send the troops for a swim. I'm going to give all this to Karslaw and see what he can do with it."
Lorna folded her arms. "He won't go for it. He'd rather send his men on an all-or-nothing charge than to knowingly send them in with inferior weapons."
Walt went to see Karslaw at the palace anyway. The man chewed his beard a moment, then shook his head. "I don't like it. Send them in naked with a handgun and thirty rounds apiece? Why not save the ammo and shoot them myself?"
Walt rubbed his eye. "That's exactly what Lorna said you'd say."
"That I'd shoot my own men?"
"That you'd rather stick with the Charge of the Light Brigade."
"Do those close to me find me that predictable?" Karslaw rumbled. "Very well, then I am consistent. As long as you can pull a surprise from your sleeve now and then, consistency is a virtue in a leader."
Walt went for one last walk around the island. It was a warm day and it felt good to sweat. He thought it might be fun to settle on an island for a while. Just really get to know every bend of the beach and fold of the hills. None of that desert island crap, though. A place where stuff grew on its own and you could pick fruit from the trees without spending all day busting your ass. Nothing too jungly, though. He'd had enough of jungles for a while.
He had nearly a week until Karslaw unleashed the Catalinan Armada, a growing collection of sloops and speedboats, and, possibly due to logistical concerns, more of the former than the latter, which hardly infused Walt with optimism. Part of him wanted to stick around for the big battle. There was still the off chance he'd come up with something better than popguns in baggies, and he would love to see if Karslaw could actually pull this shit off.
But Walt knew they couldn't. And he couldn't think of
a plan. Sticking around to watch the fireworks would only be depressing, considering that the fireworks would be made of people. It was time to leave. Before his departure could pose a distraction from Karslaw's grand plans to get the entire island killed.
He was unimpressed enough with Lorna that he thought long and hard about leaving without a word. But rowing all that way would be a serious pain in the arms, and anyway, if he smacked her into the concrete wall of an ultimatum, maybe it would finally knock some sense into her.
He went to her house and had to wait again. She approached from the road leading to the castle. He hugged her, then asked if she wanted to go for a walk.
"Why? I just got done walking."
Walt was too tired to drag it out any longer anyway. "Because I'm leaving."
She cocked her head. "What do you mean?"
"I mean I am departing this island, never to be seen again. Because you're all going to die."
"You can't."
"Sure I can. If you want to give me a ride, that would be wonderful. Want to come with me? Even better. But if neither of those options rings your bell, I'll steal a rowboat and paddle back to L.A. on my own."
"No," she said. "You can't leave me."
"Lorna, it's a bit late for the 'I'll love you forever' crap. You've been ignoring me for weeks. You're going through some shit? I'm sympathetic. Deeply. But we're all going through some shit. If you want to work it out, you've got to work it out with me. Keeping me at arm's length won't solve anything."
Her face worked in several directions at once. She bared her teeth, then touched her stomach. "I'm pregnant."
"What?"
"The situation that results when a man and a woman have unprotected sex."
Walt reeled. That much was true, although he'd made sure to pull out since their first couple nights together. And they hadn't had sex since they hiked out to see the fort. Not that that mattered, though. That was recent enough that she might not even have missed a period. Then it must have happened before the gunfight in Zacatecas. The long walk through the jungle when they'd been at their closest. They'd been pretty busy then.
"You're sure it's mine?"
She punched him in the face. "Very."
He straightened, rubbing his sore cheek. "How do you know? You don't look so pregnant to me."
"All the ways you tell without looking. The fluids that stop. The others that start up, primarily in the morning. You don't have to swell up to a blimp to know what's going on."
"Okay, well, first things first. There are teas, you know. Herbal shit. I mean, are you sure you want to—?"
He stopped dead. His head hadn't yet come back to earth after her announcement, and with the formation of his new idea, it blew away again, spinning off into the dizziest mental clouds.
"Want to what?" She sneered. "Get an abortion?"
"Yeah," Walt said. "But that can wait. First, I'm going to save your people."
23
He didn't want to teach her.
His name was Carl and his father came from the Philippines, a place Raina didn't know about. He told her it was an island chain far, far away. The islands had been conquered and reconquered for centuries. First by natives too old to name. Then by Muslims from Indonesia. Then the Catholics of Spain. Then, not so long ago, by Americans. Most recently of all, by the aliens.
Like all disputed places, its people learned to fight. Like all conquered peoples, their new masters tried to stop them. The people turned to weapons anyone would have. Knives. Sticks. Bare hands. It didn't look like much. Nothing to arouse suspicion.
It was deadly.
Carl's father learned kali in the Philippines. He moved to America. Carl was born, and the father taught his son until he exhausted his own skills, then sent Carl to the academy in Torrance, a place Raina did know—it was one of the cities just north of the peninsula. Its training wasn't like the Philippines, Carl said. Not as traditional. But in some ways better, because its masters were as famous as they were skilled—one had worked with Bruce Lee, who even Raina had heard of—and open to the ideas brought in by the students their reputations drew from around the world.
"And none of this matters," Carl told her, "because you should be learning to use a gun instead."
"I know how to pull a trigger."
"Why do you want to learn this?"
"To learn how to kill."
"You believe a fist or a knife kills better than a gun?" he said.
"I believe a gun is loud," Raina said. "I believe a gun is messy. I believe it jams and misfires and needs ammunition and gunpowder and cleaning. Guns rely on many things. Knives don't. Fists don't. I don't, either."
Carl snorted. "Then carry two guns. Learn to make bullets."
Raina scowled at the spray of color on the canvas Carl had hung on his living room wall. "I brought you your painting. You said you'd teach me."
"Did I say I won't? I said I shouldn't. If you really want to learn an obsolete art so badly, I have nothing better to do."
"Then let's start."
He smiled, amused in a way she would have found intolerably insulting from anyone else. But he had earned it. He knew how to kill in the old ways.
"We start with empty hands," he said.
"Because they're the most basic," she said.
"Who's teaching who? We start with hands because I don't have the right sticks and I'm not giving you a real knife." He smiled in that way again. Soon, she'd see it two dozen times a day. "And yes. Because the hands are most basic. In kali, one thing is everything else. A stick is a knife is a hand."
She stayed until nightfall. He allowed her to return at noon the next day. She did nothing else for a week straight.
The style was aggressive. Flurries of quick, staccato strikes at whatever target presented itself. The body or the head, if you could attack them safely, but the legs or the hands if you couldn't. It felt like it was built for her.
On the walk back to her house, two columns of men and women marched down the middle of the road. Jill was at their head, calling time. She barked a single word and the columns dispersed, scattering into the bushes and houses on the sides of the street. Raina stayed hidden in a hedge until the columns regrouped and carried on down the road.
Carl began with single actions. A punch, a slap, a jab. But from the beginning, he made her work with two hands and often both feet at the same time. She found even the simplest coordinated movements infuriatingly clumsy, her slow-motion gestures appalling.
"Why is this so hard?" she said. "I've been using all four limbs at once since I was born."
"But you're only now learning kali."
"It shouldn't be this hard to learn. A style should be natural."
"Nature doesn't come from within," he said. "Nature is something you put inside yourself."
For no good reason, he laughed.
But after her first week, it seemed to come together. She often moved without thinking, slapping away his fist with one hand and striking his arm with the other. Mauser's original training made it easier. Some of the concepts were similar, and once she understood the purpose and flow of a move, it nestled with the others in her muscles, waiting to be used.
When she wasn't with Carl, she trained on the dummy in her garage. Its limbs made good targets. The rattle of her blows spilled into the street.
"Is it really that much fun?" Martin asked her.
"It isn't about fun."
"Well, you sure seem to enjoy it." He shuffled his feet. "Can I learn, too?"
"No."
"Why not? I helped find the painting."
"You should learn from Mauser first." She struck the dummy's padded head. "Then we'll see."
Martin frowned. She resumed her flurries, advancing to wallop the dummy's arms, then scooting behind it and striking its back. After a while, Martin left.
Carl cut sticks of bamboo from the once-decorative thicket of it overwhelming the neighbor's yard. She took for granted that sticks were for hitti
ng, clubbing, and bashing, but he showed her how to poke, how to rap, how to whip the tips of the springy sticks into thighs and knuckles and eyes.
"The enemy retreats from pain," he said. "So you give him lots of it. You hurt him until he can't hurt you back."
"But hurt animals are most dangerous."
"You have to take what is given," he said. "Do you know what it means to take what's given?"
She nodded.
He smiled, but interest glimmered beneath the mockery. "Do you?"
"After the plague, I lived on my own for two years," she said. "I ate what I could find. I had to fight with dogs and other children and even a few adults. I learned to see when they were hungrier than I was so I could run away. Even if a dog had a bird and I was starving, it was best to let the dog finish and take whatever it left."
"You lived on your own that whole time? You couldn't have been more than ten years old."
She spread her feet, sticks in hand. "I used to pretend I'd forgotten what it was like, but I remember everything."
Carl had skinned a finger showing her how to block with the stick. He stuck his knuckle in his mouth and sucked away the blood. "I want you to learn with me with the same hunger you learned to survive."
She rushed at him. He knocked her to the floor.
A couple days later, Mauser shook her awake. The sunlight cut flat through the window, not yet touching her mattress on the floor.
"What?" she said.
"I want to show you something."
Her ribs and arms were bruised and welted from the lash of bamboo. "I don't want to be shown."
"Yes you do." He nudged her with the hard toe of his shoe. She slapped at his foot and he danced back. "Believe me, Raina, I don't take waking a person up lightly. If it were up to me, people-waker-uppers would be beaten with the bluntest and heaviest item at hand. But you're going to want to see this."
She rolled over and opened one eye. His hair stuck up from his head. His eyes were bleary. She doubted he'd slept. She sighed the sleepy sigh of morning and got up and found her shoes. Mauser led her down the road to the Dunemarket. The sun rose from the hills, painfully bright. Merchants unfolded stalls and rolled out blankets.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 94