Breakers (21 page)

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 cascaded 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.

The arms withdrew. The creature retreated from the rock into the grass and padded back for the clump of trees, disappearing from sight. Walt slipped from the cold water, sun beating his skin, until he could see the back of the creature's head. An instant after he'd risen, the being whirled and tore straight for him.

Walt shouted and warded one arm in front of him, knife hand close to his chest. The thing turned sideways as it closed, sticking a bushel of slapping arms and kicking legs between Walt's body and its head and two noodly arms. A leg struck Walt's shin. He grimaced and slashed at an incoming arm, flaying the tough skin down to its bone. Yellow fluid spattered the grass. The creature made no noise beyond the tapping of its feet on the stones. It picked up a rock in a pair of narrow claws and swung for Walt's head. He ducked, jabbing at its nearest leg. The thing reared up and bulled forward, knocking them both into the water.

The current pulled him downstream. The thing planted its thinner legs between submerged stones, poling along while its flatter tentacles threshed water. It closed on him in moments. He'd kept a death grip on the knife, which he waved in tight, fast flicks at a probing arm. A claw snaked in from the side and grabbed his wrist. Pain circled his arm as it crushed his tendons against his bones. He strained his trapped wrist closer to his chest, extending its arm, and slammed his other palm into its joint.

A nauseating crack shot over the burble of the water. The thing let go of his wrist and paddled backwards against the current, still silent despite its broken bone. Walt leaned into the stream, jogging forward in exaggerated strides to clear his knees of the water, and grabbed a trailing limb. He pulled down hard as he leapt out of the water, leveraging himself onto its back. His knife blade thunked against a hard skull. As arms whipped his back and clubbed the back of his head, he grabbed the creature's neck, dug in with his nails, and stabbed down hard into one wide, unblinking eye.

The thing bucked, spraying white slashes of water to all sides, flinging Walt back into the hustling creek. He tucked his head. His ribs jarred down on a rock, stealing his breath. He thrashed for his footing; before he could stand, the still-writihing body of the thing knocked him off his feet. He plunged under the water, taking an involuntary breath at the cold shock. For a panicked moment he couldn't tell which way was up. Sunlight. Air on his waving arm. He bumbled into a smooth, protruding rock, and, toes slicking over the moss, clambered his naked body up to its damp surface. He coughed, spitting water. Downstream, the slowly tumbling body lodged in the reeds at a bend in the creek.

Once he'd found his breath, Walt laughed.

He waded across the stream and dragged the corpse through the grass to dry land. There, he scanned a full arc of the light woods and meadows and the low mountains behind him. Wind shushed the grass. The stream tinkled. A bird chirred. He went back for his gear and dried himself off and put on pants and socks and shoes. He shouldered his stuff and lugged it back to the body. He laid a pistol on top of his duffel bag, spread out a tarp, selected a butcher knife and a paring knife, and rolled the creature's damp body onto the blue plastic.

He was no doctor. Despite the last few months of sporadic fish and game, he wasn't much of a butcher, either. But he was enough of a mathematician to add two and two, and either the thing in front of him had come from Earth or it hadn't; either some company had been so deep into biotech it was capable of creating humanity-erasing viruses and crab-hybrid monsters, or it had come from outer space, in which case he already had more than a few suspicions about the source of the Panhandler, too. (Though even then, there were other possibilities—if they were aliens, perhaps they were planetary vultures, and had swooped in after their monitors reported mankind was no longer an issue.)

Either way, he knew how to get to the guts of the matter.

He sliced the creature's clothes away from its body, set them aside, then stabbed the butcher knife down hard. Its skin was smooth but tough, resisting the knife like fingernails or hardened leather. Walt leaned into the blade. Clear and yellow goo slimed his hands. He sawed through the skin, knife jarring into unseen bones, some of which he was able to crack by leveraging his weight against them. Sweat beaded his brow and back. At a bone-free spot, he peeled back the hard skin and sliced it away from the membranes beneath.

The inside of the cavity looked like a mass of swollen spaghetti and meatballs colored the yellow of beached kelp and floating in a pot of watery yellow marinara. It smelled no better. He lifted out handfuls of rubbery tubes, knotted here and there by fleshy nodes the size of marbles and tennis balls. Snotty fluid glopped from his hands, pattering onto the tarp. Rubber gloves. He needed to loot some rubber gloves. The tubes and nodes hung by membranes from narrow bones.

Walt moved to the oversized head. Most of it was like the body, tough skin around fibrous lumps, but a third of the interior, including the eye sockets, was taken up by a bony ball punctured here and there by tube-choked holes. After two minutes of sawing at one of the sockets, his knife had only worn a small notch in the inner skull. He went to the creek, swooshed his hands around the cool water, and returned with a rock the size of two closed fists. The skull smashed on the third blow.

Beneath another membrane, he sorted through a pulpy, semi-solid mush of loosely connected gray-blue matter.

So at least it had a brain. All the rest of its organs, any lungs or kidneys or livers or spleens or anything like that, they were like nothing he'd ever seen before. He didn't want to believe it. Not that he didn't think they existed. He just didn't believe they'd possibly come
here
. But the nasty yellow muck he was covered in offered only one explanation: the thing he'd killed hadn't come from Earth.

Aliens, then. Aliens. Aliens with a bunch of small nodules instead of obviously vital targets. Headshots, he supposed. At least they had big heads.

He dragged the body into the creek and shoved it away with a long stick. The alien's clothing was spotted with pockets. He found a tin of dried, crumbling food with whiffs of salt and seaweed and rot. A pouch of water that smelled like a distant ocean. A blank pad that wouldn't respond to his touch or voice. A bag of metal balls inscribed with rings of pictographs. A gray, finger-sized tube with a small screen and what he thought might be a touchpad. And a hard rubber case filled with smooth, unyielding cards printed with shimmering figures and abstract icons. He ditched the food and water and added the rest to his bag. Whatever weapon it had been holding in its hands and claws had been lost in the water. He walked upstream and refilled his canteens and jugs.

This time, he traveled overland, paralleling the road from a distance of a couple hundred yards, skirting Albuquerque and the stretch of small towns that followed through the gently rising desert. Hostile aliens. Just that much more proof for how fucked up reality was. He didn't see how this changed his goals. Aside, that is, from the fact the invaders would probably nuke the shit out of the cities, or, if they were environmentally conscious, fire- or neutron- or unimaginably-advanced-alien-technology-bomb them. Then again, unless they were comically incompetent, they would have taken care of that before romping around the New Mexican wilderness. Whatever had happened to Los Angeles must have already gone down.

He tromped among the sage and yellow grass. As he descended from the foothills, the heat ascended. He napped under the shade of trees in a draw between two hills, troubled by flies, moving on in the just-warm dusk.

Aliens. Motherfucking aliens. As a kid, he'd immersed himself in Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke, all the classics, warm possibilities where the future was positive and our stellar neighbors meant us no ill-will. (Not that Heinlein, with his killer bugs and mind-controlling slugs, envisioned a hand-holding galactic UN. Still, beneath the warfare was the sense we would prevail, if only we tried hard enough and held true to ourselves as individuals and a people. Even in the barbarian-ravaged future of Asimov, the ingenuity of brilliant men carried the day.) He'd internalized this positivism—or they'd encapsulated his inborn instincts, who could be sure—but while these future-forward feelings lingered through high school, resisting the constant rot of fact and experience, this warmth had eroded during college like the wave-worn pilings below a dock, a process hidden from his higher mind. Even then, he'd paced the unsteady surface, ignoring the creakiness of the boards under his mental feet.