by J. Thorn
"Need a hand?"
She glanced over her shoulder. "He got lost."
"I know where I am," Walt said. "It's just not where I meant to be."
"Okay," Raymond smiled, confused.
Walt waved and turned down the tunnel, afflicted by the sudden need to jerk off. It was past midnight, but Otto was still on watch behind the newspaper dispensers he'd fortified at the base of the stairs. Rain punished the streets. Through the screen of mist, the mile-wide lights of the mothership hung to the west, implacable behind the black swirl of clouds. Walt went behind the counter of the CVS, where he had just enough light to complete his business, then went back into the tunnels to tell the others the ship had come back.
"About time," Otto said.
David ran his finger down the ridge of his ear. "What does this change?"
"I'm sure they'll be texting me that info any second," Walt said.
"I'm ready to go," Raymond said. "Just let us know what we need to do."
What they needed to do was watch. That was the whole strategy: minimize risk while grinding away. In that vein, they watched from the rooftops in the foggy night, rain thumping the tarps they carried for cover, and returned to the tunnels half an hour before dawn. Otto took the bathroom mirror from the CVS, carefully smashed it in half, and left the shards at the top entrance, standing the largest piece upright. He settled in down the stairs and watched the reflected street through his binoculars. Late in the afternoon, he woke Walt from a platform nap. The patrols were back.
"They can track cars really well," Raymond said. "We can drive one a few blocks, pull over and set up down the street, and see who comes out to play."
Otto smirked. "Good luck finding a battery that isn't deader than Ethel Merman."
"Who?"
"Could work," Walt said. "Any idea how big the blast radius is on their bombs?"
"Under a block." Anna sketched an intersection in the dust, circled a quarter of it. "I spent a while in San Francisco on my way down. Ran with these soldiers for a week or so. Crazy crew. When they weren't having orgies on top of Coit Tower, they were strolling over the hills with SAMs on their shoulders. Eventually, they all got killed, mostly in bombings that were hot and awful, but wouldn't frizzle your hair from a block away."
"Still a variable," Walt said. "A bad one."
"We haven't done this before," Raymond said. "They'll think we're from out of town."
He didn't like it. He didn't trust cars. Maybe that was just the New Yorker in him. "Find something we can drive."
Otto insisted on aiding Raymond's search, likely because he'd die of withdrawals if he didn't get behind the wheel and under the hood of something stat. He returned equally proud and ashamed of his find: an old-model Tempo, paint flaking from its roof, hood, and doors, one of which was crumpled by a generous dent.
Otto toweled oil from his knuckles. "Your power locks don't power, your automatic seatbelts would earn you a ticket in 48 states, and from the rattle I'm guessing your catalytic's been taken behind the barn and shot years ago. But it runs."
He'd jammed it in neutral so they could push it down to Santa Monica Boulevard without turning over the engine and risking an early visit from alien fliers. The rest of the team gathered up lasers and bows, taking pistols, swords, and hammers for emergencies. Once they were ready, Walt ran them through the plan a second time: David in the crow's-nest, spotting. Himself and Mia holed up a few blocks down, lasers ready. Otto and Anna another block further. Raymond, driving, would roll past, park three blocks past Anna and Otto, and run back to join them. If nothing came by to investigate within twenty minutes, they'd relocate their shooters down the street and try again.
In the street, the rain sifted down in tiny specks just like it had in New York, like dust in an afternoon sunbeam, the kind of more-than-drizzle that would take forever to soak your clothes but leaves your skin slick and cold in seconds. Despite that and the late December date, it wasn't truly freezing. Winter and midnight and the worst LA could offer was a chill. These people hadn't known how good they had it.
A scout ship keened from miles away, lost in the charcoal skies. They took turns pushing the car, two on the bumper with one at the wheel. The remainder watched the clouds and the street. The gutters were clogged and gray. The ankles of Walt's pants grew sodden, clinging to his legs.
They double-parked beside a blue Civic with a skeleton behind the windshield. David started up the stairwell to an office roof. Otto jogged off to scout the street. The dome light flipped on when Raymond opened the door. He stopped halfway into the seat, teeth clenched, leg jutting from the car.
Mia started forward. "Let me help."
"I've got it." He didn't have it. He struggled and wiggled, hanging from the door frame, but when he tried to swing his leg into the car, he closed his eyes and went pale. "Give me a minute."
"Hell no." Walt leaned in to pull him from the car. "You can't be gimping it up if they send a jet on the way. Driver's got to get out of the blast radius the instant he shuts off the car."
"Or she," Mia said.
Raymond stumbled from the car. "No way."
"Like it's so much safer to hide in the rain waiting to shoot Cthulhu's bastard sons with a laser gun?"
Raymond glanced at Walt. Walt shrugged. "If there were kids here, I'd let the kids fight, too."
"I don't like it," Raymond said.
Mia reached for his elbows. "If we can't do this all the way, we shouldn't be here at all."
Raymond leaned in close to her and said something too soft to hear. When they broke, Mia slung herself behind the wheel and poked at the controls until the wipers swished rain from the windshield. She turned the key. The engine kicked over, idling with a metallic rattle. Exhaust wafted into the dank air. Mia turned off the car. Walt could no longer hear the keening of the scout. The dark, rain-slicked streets looked alien, a gray netherworld from a primal past or an exhausted future. He suddenly wanted to leave. The street, the city as well. His skin prickled.
Otto ambled back to the group, rifle pouched in the crook of his arm. "All clear."
Walt gazed down the street, waiting for a sign that wouldn't come. If he'd been on his own, he would have walked away.
"Walt?" David said over the walkie-talkie, infuriating him instantly—they were reserved for emergencies, who knew whether the aliens could pick up their signal. "I think something's coming."
Clouds flowed inland, black and thick. At first Walt thought his ears were making up the sound, giving themselves something to hear besides the spatter of rain from the eaves of empty bars and Thai joints and dress shops. Then a ship slashed below the clouds, furls of vapor trailing in its stream. Down street, it braked sharply and turned on its tail.
He blinked. "Run."
"Get away from the car!" Mia turned the key, gunned forward on screeching tires. Raymond cried out. The car jolted forward and the alien vessel screamed back to meet it. Light flared from the ship's belly. Mia dove from the car into the street, rolling on the wet pavement, elbows raised to shield her face.
The street ahead became a white sun. Walt lost himself in heat and light and sound.
27
Raymond's ears rang. His head thumped. His skin stung. His nerves were a burning web of numb fire. Smoke hazed the street. Bits of falling rock clinked on pavements and parked cars. Someone was screaming. He couldn't feel his feet. A round, smoldering crater bridged the street ahead. The car was gone. So was Mia.
Someone grabbed his arm. Walt. "Come on!"
"Where's Mia?"
"It's making another pass. We have to go."
Raymond staggered forward, but Walt's arm clung to him like a wet rope. "Okay. I'll just get Mia."
That rope-like force tugged him back from the crater. Mouth gaping, David spilled from the office doors into a scree of shattered glass. Anna goggled at the sky. Otto gave them a blank look and sprinted down the cross street. Walt pulled Raymond after the old man.
Otto
swerved alongside the shelter of the buildings. Raymond's leg ached. He still couldn't see Mia. Puddles splashed around his shoes. A jet hummed way up in the sky. A human jet? Why would a human jet have bombed them? Were they killing everything that moved? His left cheek was warm and tingling. He tasted briny metal.
His existence seemed to blink off for a few minutes. Then he was down in the dark, candles flickering over the grimy tiles of the subway, seated on the platform. He stood, leg twingeing. Otto muttered with Walt across the way. Raymond limped toward him. The skinny stick of shit barely had time to flinch before Raymond punched him in the eye. Walt's head snapped back. Without a word, he bounced to his feet, jabbed Raymond in the nose, and doubled him over with another strike to the stomach. Wheezing, Raymond plowed his shoulder into Walt's midsection. The thin man jolted into the concrete.
"You dumb shits!" Otto's heavy hands pawed them apart. Walt wriggled against the old man's granite grasp, eyes fiery windows in the blank wall of his face.
"You killed her!" Raymond bucked his shoulders. "You put her in that car!"
"I sure did."
He blinked. "Then you killed her!"
"Aliens killed her."
"On your orders."
Walt just nodded, eyes dimming. Water trickled down the tunnel. Raymond tensed.
"She saved us," Otto said in his ear. "Do you understand that?"
"What are you talking about?"
"The car was the target. She hadn't hauled ass away from us, we'd all be belly-up."
"I watched from the roof." David's eyes were sunken, dark. "I didn't think any of you had survived."
Otto's hand was hot on his shoulder. He would have killed Walt if that grip weren't there, leeching away his rage, a meaty, dangling lamprey. Raymond's knees went out. He sat down hard, a tangle of legs. His howls echoed down the empty tunnel. Anna's eyes bulged. Otto shuffled. Then Raymond was crying too hard to scream, his ribs bouncing against the cool stone, tears and snot slicking his tipped face; soon, he was too tired to do anything but lie still and breathe and breathe and breathe.
By the time he finished they were gone. Raymond relit a candle and rose, shaky and strangely relaxed. His feet moved on their own. Otto and Walt murmured to each other down the platform; further below, he heard snoring. He watched himself walk up the dust-colored steps past posters of dead rappers promoting vodka and of movies that had never made it to public screens. The air was thick like a bathroom after the hot showers he no longer had. He smelled mold and washed-out urine.
The mouth of the exit was as gray as the walls. He snuffed his candle and swayed up steps still moist from the rain. A weak breeze touched his face. The street was silent, the rain finished. Broken windows gaped blackly from offices and banks and ground-floor restaurants. The city was nothing more row after row of useless, walled-in spaces. A sodden bee's nest lost under a board in a vacant field.
He wandered in a way he hadn't wandered since he was a kid. Black hills bracketed the city to the north. Soaked paper stuffed the gutters. Crashed cars rusted in intersections, the desiccated bodies of their drivers as broken as the windshields and hoods. In an alley between a tattoo parlor and a waffle house, a child's body lay under the tires of a smashed van, its leathered skin rain-soaked, its long black hair a snarled lump. When they'd moved into the house in Redondo, the basement had been filled with two generations of belongings. Box after box of his grandma's clothing scraps, patterns, zippers, and lace fringe, all yellowed and crusty. A wheeled chair, its vinyl seat hard and brittle. Tubes of paint with age-spotted labels, paint caked inside. A box of broken desk lamps with two-pronged cloth cords. Mason jars of loose screws and bolts and washers. Envelopes of undeveloped film with expiration dates in 1935, the blank photo paper separated by black tissue that shredded to the touch. All of it—every magazine, plastic bag, and screwdriver—coated in a tactile layer of dust and grime, yellow and gray and greasy. Things no amount of cleaning could make proper. Nothing could be sold or salvaged. The only thing to do was pile it up and set it on the curb.
In Los Angeles, yellow buildings rested in gray streets. It didn't matter what happened to it now. There was nothing left worth saving.
Raymond wandered until his feet blistered and his leg throbbed. When he returned to the tunnels, even Otto was asleep. In the morning, they gazed dumbly into their cans of cold beef stew.
David cleared his throat. "I think it's time we talk about where we go from here."
"Talk away," Walt said.
"I've been thinking about the structure of LAX. Specifically the sewers. If we can find a map, or devote the time to mapping them ourselves, I don't see why it would be impossible to gain entry to their local base of operations and...well, explode it."
"Start planning."
"I'm quite serious."
"Then start planning. In the meantime, we'll keep looking for chances to pick them off."
"We're not going to kill an alien invasion two and three at a time." Anna's voice was low and hard as the platform. "We'll be dead before spring. And they'll still be squirming in their towers, spawning, squirting their sperm over the Earth."
"At this point we're cavemen," Walt said. "What more can we do?"
"We can nuke them," Raymond said. They all turned his way. He hated the pity and patrimony in their eyes. "The big ship is back. It just takes one big missile."
"Boom," Anna said.
David blew into his knobby hand. "At this point, it does make for an attractive possibility."
"To prompt those things to blow up the city," Walt said. "Along with us and everyone else who's hiding in it."
Raymond rolled on his back and smiled at the black ceiling. "Where are the nukes, Otto?"
"Don't tell him."
"Otto. Where are they?"
"It won't help. It'll just get people killed."
"We're all going to die, Walt. Bombed in the street. Shot on the beach. Burned in our homes. We'll starve and we'll freeze. We'll nod out behind the wheels of cars and beside the road when we just can't go on. We'll die alone, or we'll die telling someone we love them. What does it matter? We're all dead. You can die here, setting traps for the things who killed our whole species before they set one tentacle on the dirt. Or you can die trying to kill them all. To make sure no other human feels what we've felt."
Droplets tickled down the tunnels. Otto's mustache twitched. "Vandenberg. Right north of Lompoc. Not far out of Santa Barbara."
Raymond wanted to rise that moment and walk out of this hell. Leave Walt to the creatures. But some dull, pedantic quarter of his mind informed him he didn't have the time or the energy. He wanted to run. He wanted to scream. He wanted to sleep until everything on the surface wilted to dust.
"God damn it." Walt's lighter splashed his face with quick orange light. Tobacco mingled with the mildew of the subway. "If you want to go, then go. Disappear. Don't put the rest of us at risk."
"Fuck you, Walt," Raymond smiled. "Who's coming to Vandenberg?"
Anna tipped back her chin, mouth pursed. "Staying here is stupid. I'm not getting bombed. That's for Arabians."
Raymond laughed at the roof. All this and still the old bigotry. "David?"
"She was your wife, wasn't she?" David said.
"She was."
"Sasha was mine. I'll go."
Raymond chuckled again. Walt was about to be as alone as he felt. "Otto? You want to show us the way?"
The old man hunched his heavy shoulders. "No, I don't think so. Don't think I will."
"What?"
"I get why seeing what you seen gets you ready to take out the knives. I don't blame you. She was about my daughters' age, you know." Otto smoothed his gray mustache with downward strokes. "No matter how big a boom those missiles make, I don't think it's gonna wake any of them back up."
"Fine." But it soured him, reduced his victory over Walt to a trivial, meaningless moment. Raymond was sick of his emotions pinging around like a ball-bearing on a concrete floor. "I'm
going to sleep. We'll leave tomorrow night."
He half expected Walt or Otto or both to try to talk him down, to physically stop him. Walt just watched him rise to gather his gear. Otto looked at his own hands, turning them over each other, rough skin rasping. Raymond brought his things to the lower platform and clicked off his flashlight. On the cold stone, he shivered.
* * *
The ache in his leg fueled his march toward the hills. The mist returned, fogging the windshields of the silent cars, sliming him with clammy dew. Their feet scuffed the dark sidewalks. Raymond had two moods now. Despair came with no warning, rogue waves of helplessness that sucked him out on a rippling tide. When it receded, he was left with a dry and pulsing rage. That fueled him, too. He carried one of the laser pistols in hand. He hoped he'd finally get to use it. Aliens. Looters. It didn't matter. Just one thing prevented him from making some extra noise and light right there in the street and killing whatever crawled out to investigate: getting to Vandenberg, and smashing that mothership out of the sky.
Like the night before, Walt hadn't offered any serious resistance. Just talked some bullshit about how they'd need keys and codes and electricity and the whole thing would be a stupid waste. Raymond figured those bunkers were built to last a long time. Their own generators. There would be overrides, backdoors into the system. For all Walt knew there was a big red button Raymond could mash down with his fist. If it really needed some special key or code, a general, colonel, or buck private would have stayed there till the bitter end, bleeding out every orifice, but still waiting for the president's command to rain down hell on whichever country had unleashed the virus that had killed America dead.
Walt had laughed at that ("Nobody's going to iron their uniform and run up the flag while their wives and mothers are coughing blood"), but Walt thought everyone else was just as amoral as he was. There were those who remained devoted to their duty no matter how dim the candle got. If just one soldier had stayed true to his responsibility while the rest of the world scattered and died, Raymond would free the Earth from the monsters who'd wrecked it.