by J. Thorn
"Good luck?" the stocky man said. "With what?"
"I'm not your shepherd. Besides lying down in a big human bull's-eye, traveling in a group is the stupidest thing we could do. They'd find us in an instant." Walt waved at the dark hills. "I'm leaving. On my own. If you like living, you should do the same."
"That is insane." The young woman splayed her hands at the crowd, disregarding her nudity. "We're hungry. We're tired. We don't even have any goddamn clothes. They shipped us in here from San Francisco and I don't even know where here is. People are going to die. You can't just walk away."
"I got you out. You can figure out what to do next."
He turned away. When they followed, he jogged off the road into the cheat grass and brambles; their crunching bare-footed steps diminished. When he glanced back a couple minutes later, they were still standing there, silhouettes as straight and still as human cacti.
* * *
After that, he stayed well off the road, risking contact only to meet the demands of water and food. The land descended, mountains rolling down to hills, but stayed desert the whole way, mile after mile of yellow grass, spiky green-brown shrubs, and gray dust. According to the highway markers, he was nearly forty miles into the state before he realized he'd crossed into California. Other than a two-day stretch so hot he slept out the second afternoon in an empty rambler with all the doors open, the weather ranged from slightly warm in the day to slightly cool at night. It felt exactly as he'd always imagined California would feel.
He saw an alien jet once, streaking over the southern sky. He crouched among the weeds until the drone died away. Sometimes, he imagined at least a few of the prisoners had made it out. The girl, maybe—she'd been young, strong. Who knew.
Another set of hills rose to the west. By nightfall, he climbed up the highway, a patchy set of lanes unfurling along the sides of crumbling hills. Peaks swelled beside him, massive and silent in the darkness. Green weeds appeared in tufts beside the shoulder, then leafy plants, trees in the crags and scree. Dawn broke behind him and he moved through the brush, smelling the dew on the grass and the sweet-choking scent of flowering weeds.
After panting his way up an innocuous crest, he stopped cold. In the thin daylight, one vast cityscape carpeted the valley, too long and boundless to see its ends.
21
Down the hill, a crew of aliens fanned across the roads, metal glinting from their claws. Dome-like armored vehicles ranged ahead, squirting flame into houses and condos. Thick white smoke bellowed into the skies and was blown inland in streamers by the steady offshore breeze.
Raymond's voice was soft as church. "What the hell are they doing?"
Sarah turned from the window, giving him a steady eye. "Burning out the vermin."
"That's it," Mia said. "Time to go."
Sarah cocked her head. "You want to leave?"
"I have a thing about getting burned to death."
"They got an army out there!"
"And we'll have a barbecue in here if we stay."
"Mia's right," Raymond said. "We've got everything we need. We're ready to go. We can bike south along the coast and slip through Long Beach. Find somewhere the aliens aren't."
Sarah shook her head in wide, slow strokes. "Middle of the day? We go out there, they'll cut us down. We don't know they'll get all the way up here. Even if they do, we can hide in the yard, use those rocks by the cliff's edge—"
"You haven't been here long enough," Mia said. "They keep coming, keep rooting out the survivors. They're going to keep at it until the entire city's dead."
"And you haven't been out there with them. There's no surviving out in the open. We wait this out, they're not gonna bother coming back when they think they've burned everyone out."
"We'll stay," Raymond said. Mia's head snapped his way. "Until nightfall. Then we get away from monsters for good."
Sarah's blunt face went red from brow to chin. "You'll be killed! You think a couple of housemakers are gonna survive where a company of trained soldiers gets slaughtered like cows?"
"We're not going to try to fight them. Running's much easier."
"And what about me?" She twisted, clawing up her shirt to reveal the scabby hole in her back. "How far you think I can ride a bike?"
"You'll be okay," Mia said.
"What if I'm not? What if this thing tears open and I can't keep going?"
Raymond let out a breath. "Then we'll stop and get you patched up."
Sarah laughed. "While they're shooting us with fucking lasers?"
"We're going," Mia said, low. "If you don't want to come? You can stay. You can have the house. All yours."
"No." Her eyes flicked between Raymond's, her lips parted. "No, I can't stay by myself. I'll come."
"Good," he said. "Get together anything you want to bring with. We'll be in the garage."
Blue light flashed from a flaming cul de sac at the base of the hills. A tiny figure raced across a lawn, one hand clamped to their mouth. A thick blue beam winked on for a full second. As the figure's upper body fell to the ground, severed across the hips, their legs stumbled forward and tumbled into the grass.
Raymond turned away. Sarah stared after him as he headed down the hall, eyes so bright he was afraid her fever had resurged. That would explain her mood, too. He and Mia tested the bike's chains and wheels, doublechecked the supplies in their packs. They hadn't collected any seeds from the garden. The bell peppers would have seeds inside, but for most everything else, they'd be out of luck. How many details had they overlooked? For all their work and preparation, how much would they wind up wanting in the next few days and weeks? But that was just how things always went. You couldn't waste too much time worrying about being perfect. They'd done their best. They'd make do.
"Think she'll make it?" Mia said, as if running her thoughts down a parallel track.
He toweled oil from his fingers. "I think she has a better chance coming than she does staying."
She smiled with half her mouth. "Beneath the surface of that optimism lies something very, very depressing."
There wasn't much work to do: their bikes and gear were perfectly fine, and any other tasks, sweeping or weeding or washing dishes, all that felt pointless now. Raymond wandered the house, staring at beds and counters, opening cabinets and gazing at the dusty glasses, and finally, after a long look out on the fires creeping up the hill—he could smell the smoke now, he thought, though the wind continued to blow inland—he stood by the back window to watch the foamy, everlasting sea.
"You gonna miss it?" Sarah said from behind, startling him.
"Nothing's more peaceful."
"Those waves sure are pretty." She'd changed into a tank top, a smaller one of Mia's. She wasn't wearing a bra.
"Feeling okay?" he said.
She nodded at the garden, the ocean beyond. "You sure you want to leave? Think what you could build with another body around."
"We'll find that out some place that isn't about to be burnt to the ground." He scratched his neck; he should go shave. "Though I think we may wind up with the Rebels."
Sarah ran her fingers through her choppy blonde hair. "I'd better go get the last of my things."
He watched the waves until sunset, then went outside to free the chickens and feel the sea breeze on his skin. Smoke-scent mingled with seaweed and salt. Goosebumps flushed his arms. Quite suddenly, he remembered it was November, and most of the north would soon see snow. It was so easy, down here where winter meant cool rains that could be replaced by 70-degree sunshine as early as New Year's Day, to forget how cold it could be and how long it would last. If they didn't wind up with the BRR, they'd have to stay in the Southwest until spring. Waste a couple seasons somewhere temporary before finding themselves a new home in the mountains. Well, it would only be a few months.
Back in the house, there was a strange stillness to the air, an anticipation. The floor creaked under his feet.
"Raymond?" Mia called from downstairs. "Raymo
nd, can you come down here?"
The beam of his flashlight wobbled as he jogged down the steps. Candles flickered in the garage. "Time to go?"
"For her," Sarah said. She clamped one arm around Mia's neck. The other held a pistol to the side of Mia's head. "You and me are staying right here."
22
Walt could hear it now, a steady sough that sounded so much like the wash of traffic he had almost convinced himself the next crest would reveal a coastal California that had never fallen to plague and invasion. Cars jamming along sunny streets. Taut-legged women in jogging shorts leading muscly, well-groomed pit bulls down the sidewalks. Men in sunglasses arguing breezily into their cell phones from behind the wheels of their red convertibles. After 3000 miles of walking, he'd find the one place in America that was still America.
But despite the cloudless skies, that false sound of traffic was punctuated irregularly by a heavy, crackling thunder. And the walls of nearby houses were scorched black or flattened in an ugly rubble of charcoal, jutting timbers, and gray, yellow, and black debris, things that had once been shoes and dishes and CDs and books and figurines, now nothing but torched, rained-out garbage. In his two-and-a-half-day march from the hills, he'd been shot at once, seen a handful of faces whipping drapes closed or ducking into doorways, heard the buzz and the whine of strange ships hurtling across the sky. This place was dead, too. A graveyard waiting for the last of its walking dead to wise up and bury themselves.
He wondered what Vanessa would think. It was exactly like and exactly unlike he'd imagined. The hills ringing the valley had held old ramblers and the 1960s' vision of the future. Descending brought him through miles of dirty streets and dirtier tenements, cars and buses damming whole blocks. At a glance, LA's middle had shown nothing but bilingual strip malls, grassless soccer fields, Spanish signs, and boarded-up taco shops, but there had been surprises, too: dirt lots packed with forty-foot stacks of pallets; iron grilles on the ground-floor windows of every home; bulk fabric outlets; three-story paintings of Jesus' face on the sides of warehouse walls.
And the highways—the fucking highways. Great gray ribbons of concrete soaring like bizarro Roman aqueducts. At one point, the highways were stacked four deep, one sunk into the ground, the other three crossing one on top of another until the last stood a hundred feet above the ground. Dogs gnawed bodies in the weeds. Stretches of the lanes were as blank as the desert roads; others sat clogged with vans and trucks and SUVs and sports cars, some torched black, leathery-skinned corpses sprawled on hoods and slumped behind wheels. Back in the cities, entire blocks resembled the burnt-out husks of a long-ago war, stray papers flapping in the breeze, glass glittering from porches and sidewalks. Other neighborhoods looked like model homes that had never seen a tenant.
After months of overland travel through woods, deserts, plains, and small towns, it felt nearly as alien as the field of blue cones where he'd freed two dozen people from the wired-up pen.
He knew Vanessa would have loved the weather, if nothing else. He hadn't been keeping strict track, but it was late October or early November and any kind of sustained walking left him dewed with sweat, morning or night. The skies were warm and blue. A bit chilly at night, but a light jacket was all he needed.
Two and a half days later, he could hear the wash and crash of surf.
Lines of tall palms fluttered in the constant breeze. Dead ahead, the sun gleamed hard and yellow, less than an hour from the horizon. He crested the hill. Half a mile away, a gap of silvery-blue sea glimmered between the beachside condos. Hacienda-style mansions squatted on the meandering residential roads to his right, a twin set of smokestacks rising some ways further. A couple miles to his left, a big hill or a small mountain rose in a round green lump, wreathed in sea-blown mist and the smoke boiling up from its base.
Something bad was happening over there. Logically speaking, he should have hidden for another hour until he could move with the relative safety of darkness. But the ocean was right there. He could hardly stop himself from sprinting, his pack thudding into his lower back, the sunshine soaking his skin but offset by that steady bay wind, a journey of three thousand miles reduced to a thousand final steps. He loped down the sidewalk, crouching down at intersections to watch for movement. Machines groaned a mile to his left. A single scream hung in the humid air, stopping as abruptly as an answering machine clicking off.
The strip of sea grew closer. Gulls screeched. Birds with wingspans as wide as his arms soared in twos and fours. Surf rustled and thundered. He could smell the sea more strongly than his own sweat now, a different scent from the beaches of Coney Island or Long Island—tangier, kelpier. He crossed another intersection, hand shielding his eyes from the onpouring sun, and reached the edge of what was once American civilization. A set of stairs led down to the sandy beach, flanked on one side by a blue Cape Cod-style home and on the other by a weathered apartment block with a rusty satellite dish sticking from its side. He jogged down the steps, stopping at the landing halfway down. The beach was cratered and scorched but clear of aliens or people. A rock jetty protruded a short ways to his right; further on, a wooden pier extended into the waves. South showed nothing but lifeguard stands and bathrooms on the way to a rocky beach set beneath sheer cliffs, all half-obscured by a light screen of smoke.
He headed straight across a bike path at the bottom of the steps. His shoes sunk into the sand. A tingling numbness swept over him. Ragged volleyball nets flapped in the wind. Spray speckled his face. Just before water's edge, he crossed a line of bulbous brown kelp, small white shells, and coin-sized lumps of what looked like tar. A fringe of gulls waddled away, murmuring squawks of complaint.
Walt stopped a couple feet below the tideline. Foam curled up the beach, bubbling away into the wet sand. At once he collapsed. For her, of course, Vanessa, the woman he would never see again, her megawatt grins and airy charm. But also for the knowledge—as sudden as his drop to his knees, as deep as the waters on the blue horizon—that whatever they'd had together had been gone long before the plague arrived. He cried for the complete and stupid loss of everyone and everything, of thousands of years of culture and growth swept away in the span of days. And lastly, for himself—not in self-pity, for he no longer felt any of that, but for his journey here, the sheer endurance and will of it, for the idiocy and impossibility of his nearly arbitrary quest. He'd fucking done it. He was here. He was alive.
He should have brought something of hers to give to the ocean. A picture, a necklace, a pair of her damn panties. She'd wanted to live here. Some part of her could have, and if he'd been a little wiser, he could have done more for her in death than he'd probably ever done for her in life. He sat back in the sand, disappointed in himself for the first time in a long time.
The sun hung over the horizon, round and red. It was suddenly cold. His shoelaces were bright blue.
Because they were Vanessa's. One of the pairs he'd brought to replace his on the road, which he'd done a couple weeks before losing his bags to the aliens. Hurriedly, he stripped off his shoes, tugged out the laces, stood, and splashed into the shockingly cold water until it swirled around his thighs. He balled up the laces and flung them as far as he could.
Back on the beach, he toweled off with a stiff blanket. He felt placidly empty. He thought about what he should do now. Automatically, he considered suicide. That had been the goal, anyway, to die somewhere along the reach of those endless highways. But the desire was no longer there. It had been burnt out somewhere along the way, as bygone and lost as the civilization of iPhones and stretch SUVs and high fructose corn syrup.
He supposed he should survive, then. Go see what there was to see.
He decided to watch the sun go down. It was his first glimpse of the Pacific, after all, and the ritual would put a hard cap on the trip he'd just completed. The sun sat a few degrees above the horizon, a red bloom amid the salty haze on the straight blue line of the sea. He sipped bottled water. The sand was still warm under him;
the air was just now cool. Walt felt timeless, an anonymous, ephemeral witness to a process that had played out daily for billions of years, a cycle whose significance was clear even when its mechanics were misunderstood. (And if humanity survived now, isolated pockets in the unwanted jungles, deserts, and icy wastes, how long before they once more forgot the Earth revolved around this setting sun?) He could sit there forever, observing and confirming the process of tide and moon and bird and sun and dolphin, somehow becoming the world, as far removed from mortal fears and neuroses as the breakers rolling endlessly and unstoppably to the shore. The sun sunk halfway below the waves; was he far enough south to see the green flash of its final moment?
An explosion roared over the condos and the yellow grass.
He rose to a crouch, spell broken. Bits of debris and trailing smoke ribboned the air to the north. Screams and automatic weapons drowned out the waves. Another explosion ripped through an apartment building overlooking the beach, sending its face sloughing down the slope in a clattering thunder of stone, wood, and glass.
Walt zipped up his pack and ran for the bike path lining the bottom of the harsh hills, laceless shoes flapping on his feet. On the pavement, he stuffed his shoes into his pack and turned south for the tall green cliffs. Staircases and ramps punctuated the slope every couple hundred yards. No good; he couldn't be sure what was happening up in the streets. The smoke he'd seen while cutting across town roiled a handful of blocks inland from where the shore curved along the rising hills. He'd follow that curve, by night if he had to, until it took him to a place that wasn't on fire.
Engines thrummed above. The sun was minutes set by the time Walt reached the curve in the beach. The cliffs soared a hundred feet vertical, mounted near the top by spacious decks with long, red-timbered legs. The sand gave out to a rubbly carpet of sharded rock and browning kelp. Surf welled between the stones. In the sea's quiet moments, a sound like angry static drifted from the heights. He knelt to thread new laces into his shoes and started along the rocks, splitting his attention between his footing and for any possible passage up the sheer walls.