by J. Thorn
"Mormons," Raymond said.
"What? How can you tell?"
"They're supposed to keep a year's worth of food in the house to help wait out disasters. Guess there wasn't much Jesus could do about an alien virus."
Mia tucked a black strand behind her ear. "Well, they can rest happy knowing they're still providing Christian charity. Start grabbing."
He managed to wedge a plastic drawer under each jug-laden arm and headed for home, sweating through the humid, neutral night. There, they stashed the goods in their garaged car and stood panting in the candlelit gloom.
"This'll take all night," she said. "We should just take the car over and load it up."
Raymond rolled his lips together. "I don't know."
"Because it'll waste gas? It's three blocks from here. We'll be fine."
"Not if an alien fighter jet decides we're stealing the food they rightfully earned via plague."
"You're no fun," she smiled.
"We'll compromise. I think there's a wheelbarrow in the shed."
The tire sagged, but the thing rolled. They bumped it up the steps to the foyer of the Cape Cod mansion and piled it high with drawers of food and cases of water. As they started down the sidewalk, a rising car engine blatted from around the bend.
"Get off the road," Raymond said.
"We already are."
"Leave the food." He grabbed her hand, rushed through the open iron gate of a white three-story Tuscan, and knelt behind a square stone pillar, dew soaking the knees of his jeans. A hollow keen skirled beneath the roar of the engine. Headlights bloomed in the fog up the street. A black Porsche swerved around the bend, slick with mist, and tore past their hiding spot, tail lights waggling as it skidded on the shoulder. Its engine faded.
"Yeesh," Mia murmured. "If you're going to drive drunk, you should do it in something less awesome than a Porsche."
She began to rise. Raymond grabbed her belt and forced her back down. "Normally when somebody's fleeing, it's from something."
The second half of his sentence was overwhelmed by a rising keen from up the street. A pale blue light burst through the fog some twenty feet above the ground. Raymond squinted in the glare. A truck-sized black oblong cut through the air, its edges ridged like a scallop. It hurtled past on a blast of wind and disappeared around the bend toward their house.
"Holy shit," Mia breathed.
"Let's wait a minute. It might not be the only one."
"Did that thing spook somebody into jumping into their car and taking off? Or did it see the car moving and fly in to run it down?"
Far down the hill, the night rang with the bang of high-velocity metal instantly becoming no-velocity metal. Screams filtered through the fog.
Raymond waited through a minute of silence, then rolled the wheelbarrow down to the house and pulled the garage door shut behind them. They lit a single candle apiece that night, whispering to each other in the shadows. The ship hung over the bay.
When they woke, it was gone.
They watched the skies from the window, then ventured onto the deck. With no sign of the carrier, its fighters, or the scout that had run down the driver of the Porsche, Mia watered the garden and fed the chickens while Raymond went inside for the radio and left it on the deck tuned to Josh Jones' station. It fuzzed and hissed. Raymond picked spinach and rinsed it in a bucket under the deck. He mixed pepper, vinegar, and crushed almonds and brought Mia a salad they ate in the sun.
"Maybe they don't like 72-degree days," she said.
"Or hovering-mothership ocean views."
"Where does that put us now?"
Raymond could only shake his head. His hands were sun-browned, rough-palmed. "They're crazy aliens. If we try to figure out what they're up to, we're just guessing, aren't we? For all we know, they didn't leave, they just flew a few miles up to drop a really big rock on us. The only thing we can do here is plan for the worst."
"That they'll come back, disintegrate me, amputate your limbs, and let their alien women repeatedly have their way with you."
"When does it start getting bad?"
She spritzed him with her spray bottle. "So we check the highways. See if they're traversable. Otherwise, business as usual."
"We'll check tomorrow night. Make sure they're really gone first."
Rather than surfing or going for a walk, he watched the ocean from their back yard, aware that if they had to drive away or the aliens came back with alien-nukes, he might never see it again. White foam lined the shore. Breakers rose and slapped the sand. Pelicans and gulls rode the winds and bobbed along the surface. The sea was both larger and smaller than his mental image of "the sea," with finite edges at Malibu on the north, the rocks beneath their house on the south, and the sudden straight-line terminus on the western horizon, which looked no further away than the green shores of Malibu. Yet he knew it stretched on and on and on, thousands of miles of unseen water, speckled here and there by islands you'd miss if you didn't already know they were there, so huge he could only see a bay-sized fraction of it at a time, and only then its wind-chopped surface. How long would he have to stare at the bay before he saw every drop of water circling through the Pacific?
"Well, hi out there, fellow incredulates," Josh began at 9 PM on the nose. "So the big news, in case you just awoke from a hospital coma, is an alien fleet rolled in, shot a few people, snatched a few others, and then left for more probeable pastures. Sources say they lit out for Las Vegas, but as we haven't heard from them in hours, I offer this as nothing more than rumor. Go nuts.
"Down to brass tacks and hard facts. If the military's out there preparing its inspiring resistance, all we've seen was a single F-16, possibly piloted by a madman, who managed to blow up one enemy fighter before being swallowed by the mighty Pacific. The good news: the bad guys don't have force fields or invincible polycarbon armor. They can be destroyed. Hypothetically, we can fight back.
"The bad news: they do have lasers. Or zappy light-things that resemble what we think of as lasers. They've got a big ship, too. A really, really, inconceivably huge ship. The silver lining is that as far as we know, there's just the one of these Imperial Star Destroyers. Which may be why it had to stroll off to Las Vegas itself to see what there was to see.
"Oh, right, and the other bad news: they're probably here to kick our ass. Hope some of you boys with crop dusters in the barns also have a few missiles stashed away in your grain silos."
Mia stood. "Let's go."
"What?"
"Josh said the ship's in Las Vegas. That means we can check out the freeways."
"Why can't that man just give us a damn traffic report?"
They drove down the hill in the black late-model Charger they'd stolen from one of the lots down in Torrance after deciding the increased fuel economy of a Civic hybrid wouldn't be worth the possible risk of not being able to outrun Mad Max-style attackers. Mia rolled down the window and leaned out her head to scan the skies. On the PCH, two men scattered in the headlights, bags bouncing heavily from their shoulders. After a few miles, the sprawling lanes of the 110 snarled with abandoned cars; at the edges of the Charger's headlights, a burnt-out trailer stretched across the road, packed in by the charred shells of sedans and SUVs. Raymond rolled to a stop, engine idling.
"That doesn't bode well for the I-5."
Mia nodded, frowning. "I don't suppose you ever took a whole lot of flying lessons you never told me about."
He threw it in reverse, did a head check, laughed to himself, then flipped around and, with a strange little thrill, drove the wrong way back to the onramp. Cool sea air flowed through Mia's window. The 405 stayed drivable all the way to Santa Monica, where one of its banking turns became tangled with shorn metal and fire-bubbled paint. Raymond clucked his tongue and got out on foot. His flashlight swept over bones and sun-tautened skin. The pileup was only a couple cars deep, but beyond, stalled and silent cars clogged the road like shiny boulders.
"Seen enough?" he said.
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"The PCH runs north for hundreds of miles."
"You want to check every one of them?"
"Just the ones that lead out of here. If they're serious about wiping us out, the city will be the worst place we could be."
He backtracked down the highway and swung into Santa Monica, which he knew about as well as Bangkok. Figuring the streets he'd heard about before he moved to the area must go somewhere, he drove in widening circles until he intercepted Wilshire, then cut west among sand-colored apartment complexes, pink storefronts, and palm-lined sidewalks. A white sheet painted "HELP" flapped from the roof of a department store. He jagged the car around a wreck, glass crunching under the tires. On the corner, a man in a fur coat stared them down, ambling to the middle of the street as they drove past.
Wilshire flowed into the PCH. Dark cars angled the shoulder, but the road stayed navigable as the city sprawl cleared out into a solid row of beachside houses to one side and yellow hills to the other. He drove for three miles, headlights splashing the pavement, engine whirring through the emptiness.
"Pull over," Mia said.
He slowed, guided the car into the crunching gravel. "What do you think?"
"We could go right now. Just keep driving."
"Where would we go?"
"Somewhere with a stream. Or a lake. These days every house in the world is a mountain cabin without the mountain. Why not find a real one?"
He bit the skin inside his lower lip. "We'd lose the garden."
"Damn! If only plants could grow."
"Maybe all the sun and sea breezes have wiped your mind, but it's September. In places like mountains, that means it's fall. And you know what comes after fall?"
"Bourbon and eggnog?"
"Where are we going to find that? Or anything else we need?"
She cocked her head. "With all that food we found, I don't think we'll have a problem making it through a couple seasons."
"What about winter coats? Snow gloves? Axes or hunting rifles or great big piles of wood to burn when it gets cold?"
"So we'll stop by the first sporting goods store we see. We put our house together in like four months. Do you really think it would be that hard?"
He stared at the blank dashboard. "I like it here. I don't want to leave."
"Even if that means getting vaporized by aliens?"
"What happens when they come to the mountains? Do we go to the desert? The South Pole? The moon?" He ran his hands through his hair, clasping them behind his head. "How long do we run? Are we happy? If we're not, how do we find a place where we will be? I think if you find a place where you're happy, then you have to take risks to preserve it. Staying in the city's a risk. But so is lighting out for the mountains in the middle of the night when we don't know what we'll find there any more than we know what the invaders are going to do from here."
A slow smile lit her brown eyes. "I didn't know you felt that strongly."
"Do you really want to go?"
"I think we'd be safer. But I don't think we'd be happier."
He started the Charger back up and nosed his way across the median to the opposite lanes. Wet, cool air swirled through the windows. He would have missed that moist-salt smell, would wake every morning to the confused sense that something had been lost.
"Stop the car?"
He braced himself for another change of mind. Instead, she asked him to get out, then took him by the hand and led him to the moonlight-lined beach, where she laid their clothes on the sand as a blanket, then unzipped his pants and straddled him. On the way home, he drove shirtless and shoeless.
"Apparently sin truly is reserved for humanity," Josh Jones reported a few days later, "because the aliens buzzed out of Vegas in just two days. Grapevine hears tell of men on the ground. Alien men, that is, or possibly women, or men-women, or cloaca-sporting lobster-monsters who find our human penises and vaginas so sickening they crossed the inky void just to stamp us out. In any event, these things are said to have lots of spindly arms and legs, with skin as hard and crusty as old sourdough. Supposedly they spent a lot of time going into hotels and coming out with corpses. Not mummy-bones, either—big wet fresh ones. Like going down to the farmer's market, you know, except instead of coming home with ripe red tomatoes, it's dead bodies. These ground troops have been seen in Vegas after the ship set sail.
"And speaking of sourdough, the mother ship was last reported lumbering west for San Francisco. Stay safe, friends."
Raymond and Mia resumed gardening and water-gathering and foraging. In concession, he took a trip to the REI, where they went in with flashlights and loaded up the car with parkas, sleeping bags, axes of various sizes, lanterns and replacement lights, freshwater fishing tackle with its bright pink PowerBait, jack knives and hunting knives and scaling knives. Every single rifle was gone. Brass littered the floor, spinning away over the hard white tile and brown stains of dried blood.
Josh's reports grew sparse. More house-to-house alien raids in San Francisco, then up to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, where fleeing motorists were destroyed by scalloped black fighters with platoons of alien infantry remaining behind to scour the cities. For several days, Josh had no news of the aliens at all: the carrier had disappeared somewhere over Canada.
Raymond woke two weeks after the carrier's departure to see it hovering above the bay. Lumbering, beetle-like vessels disappeared into the city while the wedge-shaped blue fighters circled overhead. After striking out at two more sports stores, Mia had ventured back to the former house of the Mormons. She'd come back with a pair of scoped rifles, a .45 and a 9mm pistol, and green cardboard ammo boxes that felt far too heavy for their size. The morning of the aliens' return, she stuck the .45 in her belt and handed him the 9mm.
"Don't leave home without it."
That night gunfire crackled from the beach cities below them. Unseen ships keened below the cliffs. Fire blossomed a short ways inland, thick gray smoke angling into the sky. It burnt out by morning.
There wasn't much to do but watch from the windows. They held hands in silence. With warm afternoon sunlight banking off the waves, one of the heavy ships detached from the carrier and, flanked by two fighters, flew straight for the hills.
Mia pulled him away from the window into the lushly carpeted hallway, where they flattened their backs against the hall. The bass oscillation of an engine approached, climaxed, began to fade, then abruptly ceased.
"What's the plan?" Raymond said.
"Nothing to do but sit tight, is there? Unless you'd rather get blown up in the car."
"No. We can't afford the insurance bump."
He locked the door and drew the curtains. Hours passed with little more than the deep warble of the heavy vessel and the high whines of the fighters. Once, they heard the dry pop of pistols. With the sun hanging just above the horizon, an engine growled nearby. The staccato clatter of steps struck the asphalt.
Raymond parted the curtains. Up the street, alien foot troops fanned out from a boxy covered vehicle. Metal glinted in clawed limbs. While three took up position behind it, one of the beings strode to the picture window of the house two doors down and bashed the butt of a long rifle through the glass. Another team of four broke toward the neighboring house; behind them, four more trampled the overgrown flowers of the front yard on the way to their gates.
"Oh Jesus," Mia said.
Raymond's head buzzed numbly. "The panic room. Now."
He ran to the back bedroom and the painted steel door set into its wall. The handle wouldn't budge. From outside, metal groaned and clanged against the pavement.
"It's stuck," he said.
"Let me try." Mia bumped him out of the way and pulled with all her strength. With a frustrated shriek, she leaned on the brushed steel handle and rammed her shoulder into the door. "Did you lock this?"
"How would I lock it from the outside?"
"How should I know? I grew up in a trailer, not this ritzy mansion bullshit—" Downstairs, glass casc
aded across the stone floors. A Y-shaped vein pulsed on Mia's forehead. She grabbed his hand. "Come on."
She raced for the back deck, closing the door behind them. A soft breeze countered the sunlight washing Raymond's skin. Below the deck, the yard terminated in a waist-high stone fence, cliffs and sea below. He bared his teeth. Even if they could leap clear of the rocks, the water would be no more than a few feet deep.
"Boost me up," Mia whispered. He goggled at her; she slapped him and cradled her hands in example. "Snap out of it and give me a boost!"
He laced his fingers together. She stepped in, steadying herself against the wall as he lifted her, forearms straining, her bare foot secure in his hands. She grabbed the lip of the roof and wriggled her chest and hips up over the edge as he pushed her feet up from below. She turned around and dangled her arm down.
Raymond crouched and jumped. Stucco scraped his fingers. His knuckles strained, supporting his weight as he kicked his legs against the wall. Mia clamped his forearms and heaved. The roof's edge sheared skin from his chest. He got a knee up and rolled on his back, panting. Mia pressed her body to the shallow pitch and army-crawled away from the edge. Muffled footsteps filtered from below.
16
Grass tickled the creature's cloth-wrapped abdomen. A flock of sparrows swooped over the creek. The creature spun, two noodly limbs shooting upright and tracking the vector of the birds' cheeping flight. Walt eased himself off the rock into the cold water. Slick rocks clacked under his soles. He crouched low, submerging himself until the rushing water soaked the back of his head, face upturned to clear his nose. He steadied himself against the rock with one hand and brought his knife to just below the surface.
Grass threshed. A three-fingered, stick-like limb parted the green wall at the bank of the creek. The creature glided forward, limbs splashing in the shallows. Rocks clonked beneath it. Walt's fingers tightened around the knife. The thing tapped the rock he'd sunned on with two brown-gray arms, planted them firm, and leaned its disclike body and bulbous, octopine head over the gurgling water. Walt took a good long look at the ridges of its neck, a supple thing that broadened to a fat stock where it connected to the body, which was shaped like one of the water-smoothed pebbles under his feet. A collar of fine fabric wrapped the base of its neck, flowing into a skintight blue wrap of its body with long holes on both sides to sleeve its several arms. It craned forward, slowly turning the two rubbery arms through a wide arc. The creek jangled.